


A Willing Sort of Madness

by We_Have_Become_Anathema



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Disturbing Themes, Gen, M/M, Medical Torture, Mental Illness, Psychological Horror, Psychological Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-12
Updated: 2014-08-21
Packaged: 2017-11-16 03:53:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/535187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/We_Have_Become_Anathema/pseuds/We_Have_Become_Anathema
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had never been about coping or managing or getting better. This wasn’t something anyone could fix, because you couldn’t just kill the man, nor could you convince him that he wasn’t real. Because at the end of the day, he was the one who was there.</p><p>He was the one who was always there.</p><p>And some days…</p><p>That wasn’t a comfort.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. An Empty Railway Station of Derailed Trains of Thought

**Author's Note:**

> Un-beta'd. If anyone would like to be a beta, please let me know, as I will be continuing this on and would appreciate some outside feedback.

Chapter 1: An Empty Railway Station of Derailed Trains of Thought

Sam Winchester had never had an easy life, never been blessed with good fortune, never been born with a silver spoon in mouth. He'd fought tooth and nail for everything he had and everything he wanted, and most days he felt that all he'd ever accomplished was slipping through his fingers like so many grains of sand. Each morning dawned only to bring a new trial, another tribulation to the young man. Not quite thirty yet and already he was weary of life, weary of each sunrise that he could see through the small, barred window in his padded cell. He hadn't always been in this prison of whitewashed calm and drug induced complacency, where people whispered instead of shouted and good doctors told you that if you'd just stop talking to the person over their shoulder then maybe they wouldn't have to give you so many pills. No. He'd had a life once, outside the walls of this place that hedged him in and held him captive with his tormentor, more effectively than any djinn. Or at least, he thought he'd had a life, but some days it was so hard to remember when the hallucinations had begun and when his life had ended.

Sam Winchester had been away at college, Stanford, when his brother, Dean, had picked him up for a weekend hunting trip with their alcoholic ex-marine father. Sam had come back from that frustrating and utterly exhausting trip and collapsed into bed, and he thinks it’s here, in this moment, that he can trace the beginning of his decent into madness. For as he laid on the bed, exhausted from a wearying ordeal with his brother, emotions conflicted over whether he even wanted to attempt reestablishing relations with his estranged family, he felt a drop of something sticky and viscous plop down onto his forehead and then another. Opening his eyes he saw his girlfriend, Jessica, on the ceiling, suspended as if she was laying on the ground and he was the one whom gravity was forgetting, her hair splayed out in a corona about her head. Her eyes were wide and frightened, staring at him with the soulless gaze of the dead, right before she caught on fire. He'd managed to roll off the bed and run into the kitchen, breath ragged and shallow, before he'd slammed into... Jessica? That's the first hallucination he can remember, because it was the first he had evidence that it wasn't true, or at least, he thinks it is. Some days, he's not sure if Jess was ever real. Some days he still sees her, but only as a second skin for his main companion who haunts him, hounds him, day and night.

So he left Stanford, left his 'normal life' without giving notice or explanation, and traveled with his brother; hoping against hope that his brother's steady, quiet strength would somehow help ground him. It almost did, almost chased away the demons in the corners of his mind, almost stilled the drums in the deep, almost quelled the raging of the coming tempest. But four years passed and he was losing time, blackouts were too frequent now. He was seeing his companion every day, and who was he to say which days were real and which were fake. The final straw came when he awoke one night and found his hands clenched around Dean's throat, his brother's eyes wild and frenzied as he tried to shake his nearly possessed brother off.

It hadn’t been Sam who had started choking Dean…

They'd checked Sam into the asylum the next day.

Neither of them talked over the long car ride. Neither of them had anything to say. It'd been four years, and Sam had never once told Dean that his constant companion was Lucifer, so why should he cross that chasm of silence now to try and mend a relationship that was quite literally choked by his lies of omission and tainted by blood. Instead, he'd looked out the windows and then filed mutely into his new prison, never speaking to another soul; not his doctors, not the attendants, not the other patients, all for fear that Lucifer might again become possessive of him and use his body to enact his swift retribution.

What did it matter if this was real or not? Either way, he was living in Hell.

But even in Hell, one learns to adapt; and over the years, his jailor and tormentor became something of an on again off again companion, foul though his temper was when it was roused. So three years passed by with the dull progression of time that is marked only in the hollow spaces left in your bones as you carve meaning into silence and find visions in the empty stares into the abyss of nothing.

And so it was that one blustery autumn morning, as the first beams of the new day began to creep through his barred window and kissed the cushioned surface of his padded ceiling, that Sam Winchester lay there, staring up at the ceiling silently. He absently decided to count the padded mounds again, wondering if one had been taken or added whilst he'd managed to get a brief forty minutes of sleep before having another nightmare. He noticed Lucifer’s presence in the room, but chose to ignore him, busying himself with sitting up slightly and grabbing the pill one of the doctors must have left for him, swallowing it with a sip of water.

Today was when he was to meet his latest psychiatrist in a string of psychiatrists whom he had never cared enough to talk to, let alone look in the eye. He thought that three years of silence would have been enough of a clue as to the fact that he wasn’t interested in talking to people, but he supposed that it was their job to keep trying, just as it was his job to keep ignoring all of them. If he didn’t ignore them, well, that was too painful on so many levels. For talking to them would only make it painfully obvious that he simply could no longer differentiate between what was real and what was not. That fact alone cut him to the core, and how he wished that it didn’t. How he wished that he could be numb to the fact that he had completely lost himself to the world around him, floundering helplessly in the transient reality inside his mind. So he didn't talk about it, he didn't acknowledge it, didn’t let it show that each day that fact was eating away at him like a canker.

Sam rubbed his eyes, holding back a yawn as he leaned back against the wall.

"Penny for your thoughts?" Lucifer murmured quietly, barely a whisper above the smooth electric hum of the halogen lights overhead. He was relaxed for the moment, a rare peace between the two that would certainly be shattered once one of his many more capricious moods took hold of him; but for this moment, he was content to lean against the quilted surface of the padded wall and inspect his fingernails, only occasionally glancing through ashen blond lashes at his wearied comrade.

Sam’s response was a silence that stretched on for what felt like an eternity, as he listened to the subtle sounds that came from Lucifer: the quiet breaths, the slight shifting of weight from foot to foot, the rustle of his shirt as he raises a hand to scratch at his nose. He could catalogue Lucifer in sensations like sound and sight and smell, in minutia that most people never bother to take the time to observe, and that was part of what scared him about the fallen angel. The minutia made him real, gave him a weight and a gravity and a quantitative mass. Could the same be said for other people? For that matter, how much of what he perceived was a fabrication of his senses? After all, when you’re crazy, can you trust what you perceive, what you empirically _know_?

A dream was much the same, information that your mind laid forth into an alternate reality, different from one’s own, in which the rules could be forwards or backwards or upside down. And would you know? They said that you could tell by doing things in dreams, like trying to turn on a light switch or pinching yourself or knocking on wood; but wasn’t that all dependent on the function of how well your memory had catalogued those actions and how well your subconscious could recreate them? The wearied man blinked slowly, the insides of his eyelids dragging against his dry eyes like sandpaper, practically an audible resistance, and he wondered if he would ever be able to distinguish reality from his hallucinations again. Lucifer was real. He just wasn’t certain of all these other people who flitted in and out of his life like mayflies, moving too fast and living too short of lives to catalogue their nuances.

He often lost his train of thought like this as his thoughts would chase themselves down damp forest paths in his mind, lush with undergrowth, which nearly screamed to be pondered, to be explored. It was just one more reason that Sam avoided conversations with people; his thoughts were too hard to hold onto, his mind all too ready for introspection.

"Did you give me that nightmare last night? Or was it all me?" he asked softly, finally pulling his mind back from its tangential musings, taking another sip of the water to help unstick his tongue from his palette. Last night's dream had been particularly awful. In it, Mary and John and Dean were there, but they weren't them, not really. They were shades of themselves, or maybe tormented wraiths, whispering torturous, barbarous things to Sam that he didn't want to hear and yet knew by heart. He’d woken up just as they were closing in on him, but not soon enough to escape the torture of their words which still resounded through his head. The problem was that their words weren’t lies, everything they accused him of was true and damning.

The fallen angel gave Sam a feline grin, feral and vicious, "Now bunk buddy, you know that I prefer a more one on one approach when I invade your dreams." Stalking towards the young man's bed with a sinuous grace that would have been impossible for a corporeal being, the man stopped just short of the edge of the bed and crossed his arms. "Using multiple people, just feels so... impersonal, wouldn't you say?" He rolled his wrist, gesturing loosely with his right hand as he thought about the mechanics of how he enjoyed torturing Sam the most. "I do appreciate using those closest to you, but all at once? No, that loses something. It's better to draw it out," pausing, he pointed at Sam and winked, his head cocking rakishly to the side, "wouldn't you agree?"

Sam flinched slightly at the response, looking anywhere but at Lucifer, trying to avoid his suffocating gaze. He had no idea how Lucifer still had this effect, after all it had been years, but he could still render Sam terrified. He let out a shaky sigh, nodding in response to the question, which he presumed was rhetorical. Briefly he wondered if Lucifer actually wanted an answer to his rhetorical question, because sometimes he was like that, demanding answers more for attention than for the sake of the conversation at hand.

Lucifer chuckled darkly before raising his head at the sound of a key slipping the tumblers of the lock in Sam's door. "Guess playtime will wait a little today. We have to look our best for our new shrink today. Right, Sammy boy?" His grin tugged one side of his mouth, pulling it into a thin scar across his face, mirthless and full of foreboding. "I can't imagine why they keep sending you new ones. Haven't they realized that you won't talk to anyone yet?"

"Must say I agree with you there." Sam muttered begrudgingly, leaning back and closing his eyes as someone wandered in. He briefly heard the voice of one his nurses telling him that this was his new psychiatrist, who had just come along to introduce himself before their session later on that afternoon. He didn't acknowledge that the nurse had even spoken, didn't even open his eyes. It wasn’t until the psychiatrist spoke, his voice painfully familiar, that Sam's eyes snapped open, and he stared up at the man. He was so startled that he’d missed whatever it was the man had been saying, but that was immaterial, because he wouldn’t have been able to hear anything past the roaring in his own ear. For in front of him, he knew all of this. The blonde hair, the blue eyes, the focus, it was all there in his face. There was two of them in the room, two Lucifers.

"Oh my..." The gruff male nurse, or attendant as he preferred to call his position, couldn't help but exclaim. He looked between the startled expression on Sam's face and the new psychiatrist. "Well," He clapped the man on his shoulder, "You must really be something special, doc, because Sammy here never so much as looks twice at anyone."

"Mhmm," The man carefully extricated himself from the nurse's grip and turned his attention to Sam, holding out a hand just far away enough from the younger man to not feel threatening, but close enough that he would only need to sit up slightly to shake it. "Greetings, Sam, my name is Nikolai Woland, but please feel free to call me Nick. I'm going to be your new psychiatrist."

Sam could hear his heart beating, far too fast for his liking, too fast likely to be healthy with his sedentary life style. Was this real? He looked back and forth between 'Nick' and Lucifer, the latter of whom looked about to burst into a fit of laughter at any second. He flinched away from Nick's hand, knowing that this had to be one of Lucifer's sick jokes. "Stay… Stay away from me!" he hissed, although his voice wasn't anywhere near as firm as he wanted it to be. God, his head was suddenly killing him.

The nurse's mouth just about fell off of his face, "He... talked? He _never_ talks!" Turning his gaze back to the new psychiatrist, he couldn't help the tinge of respect that crept into his eyes, even if it was unwarranted. He had no idea what was special about this man, but no one affected any change in the Winchester, and in less than a minute this man had gotten him actually saying something?

Lucifer snickered and placed a hand over his mouth, shaking his head back and forth as his eyes twinkled in devious mirth. "Oh, this. This is simply too delicious." He gesture between himself and the doctor for a moment, "You think I had something to do with him?"

Pulling his hand away slowly, Nikolai was careful to keep any emotion off his face, portraying only a collected calm that he'd found had helped put his patients at ease at his last position. "Well, I look forward to seeing you at our appointment this afternoon, Sam." As Nikolai nodded his head to Sam, Lucifer looped an arm over his doppelgänger’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.

"Oh Sammy, we are going to have. So. Much. Fun."

Sam ignored the nurse’s asinine comments, regarding him as insignificant, as he always did. He looked over at Lucifer, who was still gently snickering, reminding him of a hyena, bloodthirsty for a spectacle. No. This wasn't real. It couldn't be real. Maybe this whole thing was just another game he had to play, another deadly game where he was thrown into the middle with no idea of the rules or the expectations or the winning team. Either way, he was still very nearly petrified at the thought of two Lucifers. "No." He groaned, leaning forward and putting his head in his hands. Real or not, this was going to take a lot of effort. He genuinely couldn't tell whether or not Lucifer had anything to do with this, but the look on his face made it seem like even Lucifer found this too good to be to true.

Nikolai seemed to debate whether or not he should say anything more, some internal struggle held him captive a moment longer before he came to a decision and merely nodded to the tortured man. Turning on his heel in a manner reminiscent of military training, he walked from the room with much the same fluid grace that Lucifer possessed but only half the self-importance. The nurse, the salt and peppered, bearded fellow named Bobby Singer, followed out after him, still dumbfounded by the short exchange.

"Well now, things just got a whole new level of exciting, haven't they?" Lucifer said with a smirk, sitting down next to Sam on the edge of the bed. He bumped shoulders with the Winchester, fiendish glee on his face.

Sam shuffled away, recoiling immediately at Lucifer's touch, still in a state of panic. "I... I don't understand. How?" he muttered, his voice sounding a lot more broken than he wanted it to. "You seriously had nothing to do with this?" he asked, although he was fairly certain he wouldn't get a straight answer from his fallen companion.

Shrugging, as if the younger man's horror at his proximity meant nothing to him, Lucifer crossed a leg over his knee and rested his elbow on it, propping his chin on his fist so that he could look over at Sam in a slightly more relaxed pose. "He’s really not my style of torture. Filleting off your skin for a few hours in your mind or actually breaking your bones when you ignore me, but this? No. Maybe he's from your subconscious? I hate to say it, Sam, but you are the crazy one, out of the two of us." Mused the angel quietly. "I mean, we both know that I'm more than a little possessive, so why, by all that is damned, would I want to compete with another version of myself for your attentions?" Pausing to think a moment, he unfolded himself and bent down towards the floor, pulling a chain up from a deep fissure in the tiled floor that Sam was almost sure hadn’t existed before today, but he couldn’t be sure, because sometimes they changed how many quilted bumps were on the ceiling and sometimes people came into his room without faces. _Reality_ was simply too capricious to trust.

"No, I think we'll spend the time until your session in quiet contemplation about why we shouldn't talk to strangers." Lucifer turned around and the chain sprang to life, whipping around Sam and securing him to the bed.

He thought for a second about what Lucifer said. It was true; he couldn't understand why Lucifer would make another version of himself when he had no real reason to, especially when this doppelgänger seemed so calm and ordinary, the opposite of Lucifer. However his thoughts were abruptly cut off as he felt the bite of cold steel rip across his skin, tightening incrementally as if the chain was some enchanted boa constrictor, squeezing tighter with every exhalation he made. He struggled furiously, although he knew there was no point, but he’d be damned if he let himself be trussed up without a fight, anger and claustrophobia equally fuelling his resolve. "What the hell?" he stammered, still struggling against his binds.

Here it was; the dichotomy of Lucifer that had him walking a tightrope and sleeping with both eyes screwed firmly shut, the madness that was a snarling beast inside the fallen angel’s heart and caused his ordinarily gentle nature to twist into the facsimile of a demon and torment Sam out of an unimaginable depth of sorrow. And as petrified as Sam was in these moments, he couldn’t help the part of his heart the broke because he honestly felt that he understood that Lucifer lashed out at him because there was someone who had wronged him long before, whom he couldn’t ever forgive and he couldn’t ever forget; and it wasn’t hate that drove his actions, but the most twisted love that Sam had ever seen. And that broke his heart, shattered it into a million pieces; because all it took was for him to imagine if Dean or John ever cast him away, told him that he wasn’t worth it… But hadn’t that happened already?

It had been three years, and no one had ever visited him. Not once.

So yes. Sam thought that maybe, in some infinitesimally small way, he could understand the depth of sorrow and betrayal that shown in Lucifer’s baleful eyes.

“Why are you doing this, Lucifer? Are you planning on torturing me because I, what? Talked to the guy? Told him to leave me alone?” Sam bit out; his emotions waging a war for prominence as his body swiftly fell into the old routine of “fight or flight” adrenal response.

But Lucifer didn’t respond, didn’t explain his sound and fury. Sam knew something had set him off, but it was so very rare for Lucifer to be lucid enough in these moments to explain himself.

Instead his face morphed, long golden hair cascaded down to frame it. Suddenly Jess was standing there, gazing at Sam with a sad sort of compassion. She sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked the side of his face. "Why did you leave me all alone, Sam? After that hunting trip with your brother, you came back but, it's like you never really came back to me, did you?"

Every time Lucifer did this, Sam imagined the next time would become a little bit easier. It was his favorite torture after all, so he used it a lot. Sam held on to the hope, but it never came true, it never got any easier. His heart literally ached when he saw Jess in front of him, felt Jess' hand touch his face gently. He closed his eyes; it was all he could do. "Stop it. Stop this. I won't talk to them anymore, alright? Just stop it, please…" he pleaded, squeezing his eyes shut even tighter, trying to block out Jess... no, Lucifer's words.

Another hand was placed onto his face, feather light and lovingly gentle, "Sam, please look at me. Please." Jessica pleaded with him in a voice that was ravaged with pain and remorse. "I can tell that you're broken over all of this, that you feel guilty. You never could hide that from me, you know?" She smiled then, a small, fragile thing, like the caged bird that still found the strength to sing. Stroking his face again she leaned in and placed a chaste kiss against each of his closed eyelids. "I mean, when you start telling me that your dead family members are haunting your dreams and telling you that you weren't good enough, Sam, that kind of clues me in that you need me to tell you that I forgive you. That I'll always forgive you."

He shook his head, trying to get her... him to get off of him. Those words hurt, almost as much as most of the physical torture he'd experienced in the past, and in some ways they hurt worse, hurt different. They stabbed in places that he thought no longer felt anything, places of his heart that he though had long since collected dust and hung cobwebs and ossified; but the fresh waves of pain brought with them a physical nausea that would have cause him to double over if he wasn’t restrained by the chains. He barely kept his eyes shut, knowing that if he had to look at Jess, it'd be that much closer to impossible to ignore her – him – , that much closer to impossible to look into those immortal eyes and not resonate with the pain inside, drown inside them.

"I'm begging you. Stop this." He struggle harder against the chains that held him in place. He bit down on his lip, needing something else to focus on other than the sounds of Jess' voice. The small amount of physical pain was a sweet release, giving him something to distract himself with. He knew this was probably a bad idea, as it would just enrage Lucifer off even more, but he was past the point of caring.

Jess moved one of her hands from his face and began stroking it through his hair, trailing nails softly against his scalp as she used to do when they'd lain together and he'd awoken from his nightmares, scared and stressed and so petrified to close his eyes. "Why do you always push me away Sam? You know that this doesn't have to be a bad thing." And she wasn't just talking about now, wasn't just talking about her, was she?

Sam _almost_ relaxed into Jess' touch, almost. It used to be such a great comfort to him, and Lucifer had even managed to manipulate that into a form of torture. He shook his head fiercely, trying to get her hands off him. "You're not Jess. I'm not an idiot. I'm not gonna give in, you know that." Finally opening his eyes to look at 'Jess', he glared at her, still biting down fiercely on his lip as the copper tang of blood filling his mouth and flooding his nose with its heady scent, helping to ground him. "You're not real." he hissed, finally sounding just as harsh as he intended to.

Because Lucifer was real, but Jess wasn’t. Had she ever? He didn’t know anymore, but this wasn’t real. Not now, not here.

Her hand stilled in its motion as her eyes took on a glassy shine, filling with hot, burning tears. In a whisper that was wrenched from her chest she finally asked as the first tear fell onto his face, "But you wish I was sometimes, don't you Sam? I do everything for you, I'll be anyone for you, Sammy... So why? Why?" Her tears were falling faster, blurring her vision as she buried her face in his chest.

 He took a deep breath, repeating it to himself over and over again in his head that she was not real. He wasn't going to let Lucifer win, not this time. Not ever. Jess was dead and that was a truth he had to hold onto, whether it was real or not; otherwise he would torture himself endlessly with the what ifs that never ended. "Fuck you." Hissing, he jerked away again to get 'Jess' off him.

Jess's hands suddenly gripped his head like talons, nails biting into the flesh with painful precision. With her head still buried in his chest she murmured, "If you want to make this harder on yourself, I wash my hands of you..." Pulling herself from him as if there was a gravitational attraction, bonding them together, she rose with grim determination, her skin sloughing off in great, bloody, gelatinous sections; until Lucifer stared down at him with a harsh expression. "She would have gone easier on you, you know," he whispered, voice tight with some uncertain emotion. Then he dug his clawed fingers through Sam's skull and bashed the man's cranium against the headboard until he blacked out and knew no more.

 

 

* * *

He had no idea how long he'd been unconscious for, but he hadn't had any nightmares, so likely it wasn't that long at all. Groaning at the new feeling of pain in his head, he opened his eyes to find he was still chained to the bed. He looked up to find Lucifer glaring down at him, looking decidedly infuriated. Sam immediately started to regret his actions, and not just because he'd pissed Lucifer off. "Sorry." His voice was weak and too deep from sleep, not sounding at all like his own, as he meet Lucifer's gaze. For with all the pain that Lucifer brought down upon him, he was also the only one in Sam’s life who was always there, the only one who accepted every apology without ceremony, the only one who shared riddles in the lazy afternoons and laughter in the darkness before the dawn. He may have been a fallen angel, but when they weren’t at each other’s necks – and there were times when Sam was as much to blame as Lucifer – he was indeed Sam’s closest confidant.

Lucifer continued in his silent vigil a while longer, the anger bleeding out of his gaze into apathy at the word. Eventually he scoffed and flicked his hand, the chains recoiling back into the crack in the linoleum tiled floor and disappearing. Silently turning on his heel, he stalked across the room and stood against the far wall, again watching Sam. "So, what are you going to do about Lucifer number 2?"

He breathed a sigh of relief as the chains uncoiled and fell away, stretching his limbs immediately. He relaxed a little, and sat up, leaning against the headboard. Flexing one of his numb hands, he felt about his head with the other, and came away with blood from ten new gashes in his skull. His mind only dimly registered that there was blood on both of his hands, tissue and hair and blood under all of his fingernails. However, it was the nature of his delusions to ignore the paradox, because Lucifer had been the one to hurt him. "I'm still really confused by the whole thing." he mumbled honestly. "What do you want me to do? You seemed pretty pissed that I spoke to him." he muttered simply.

The angel shook his head mutely and stared off into the middle distance that was neither here nor there, somewhere in his memories. When he spoke it was hazy, as if from a dream, "How many years have we been together now, and you still don't understand me... It wasn't that you spoke to him." Finally looking at his companion, Lucifer narrowed his eyes slightly in some dark emotion, but with half the conviction of earlier, "It's that you conjured him up in the first place."

"But I didn't mean to! I don't even know what's real, what I'm thinking or what you're thinking anymore. It's all merged into one fucked up little world, hence the reason I'm stuck in here." he snapped, gesturing around his head with a hand, showing the maelstrom of his mind; and he could believe how much more at ease he felt after finally saying these things out loud. "I didn't do it on purpose." he muttered, softer this time. In all honesty, he wished he was still in his nightmares at times like this. Down there it was straightforward, no confusion. This was just torturous on so many levels.

The tension bled out of the lines and angles of Lucifer's body then, and he relaxed his pose. "No, I suppose you didn't." He walked over to the bed and knelt down in front of Sam, putting himself a little lower than the young man's eye level and gazing up at him with a magnanimity that was always there during his more pleasant moments, as if the two of them were the thickest of thieves. "All I wanted was a little honesty about it, and if you say it, then that's all there is to it. We'll get to the bottom of this Nikolai fellow..."

He didn't want to trust him, but he did. He knew that he wouldn't hurt him, not for now anyway. He could tell from the look in his eyes, a look he'd seen on the rare occasions where Lucifer wasn't tormenting him, just talking to him. He nodded simply, visibly relaxing. "Yeah. Alright..." he replied softly, before taking a sip of the water next to his bed.


	2. Strip Away All Parts of Me Where Death Has Taken Hold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: There are rather graphic depictions of horror and medical related torture, as well as maggots. If depictions of surgery, maggots, or other such items are triggers for you, please note you have been warned.

 

Chapter 2: Strip Away All Parts of Me Where Death Has Taken Hold

Lucifer bounced on his heels, patting his knees in preparation of pushing himself back up to standing, when the familiar sound of a key sliding into the lock broke the silence of their room. "Ah, speak of the devil and he shall appear, right Sammy?" He winked at the young man and raked a hand through his short ash blond hair.

  
A female attendant entered the room and smiled brightly at Sam, although her expression seemed a tad forced, "Well hello there, Starshine, ready for your meeting with your new doctor?"

  
He looked at Lucifer, wondering whether or not he could speak. He noticed Lucifer shrug his shoulders, so he nodded at the nurse slowly, ignoring the forced grin on her face. He finished off his water, finding comfort in it for some bizarre reason. Maybe because it was such a normal thing to do, in a place where everything was far so from normal.

  
Pushing her loose mahogany curls behind her ears, she held the door open and waved for Sam to exit his room. Experience told her not to expect any real interaction with the silent patient, but the board always reminded them to keep trying, even with the real wackos like Winchester. She eyed the scabbing on his scalp and suppressed the urge to sigh, looked like he'd been hurting himself again. Then she saw the dried blood on his fingers, and she realized he’d done it recently. She'd have to make a note of that and see about cleaning it up after his appointment.

  
Lucifer stood up and rolled his eyes at the woman before miming her actions, holding out his hand for Sam to lead the way. "Ladies first." Placing his hands in his pockets, he raised his shoulders slightly and fell into step behind Sam.

  
He walked out of his room for the first time in what seemed like forever. He usually just refused to acknowledge that the nurses were even there, not without Lucifer's permission. It felt strange, to say the least, leaving his room. He followed the nurse, keeping his fists clenched tightly, keeping a close eye on everyone and everything around him.

  
The attendant couldn't help her surprise when Sam got off his bed and, somewhat mechanically, left his room, following her through the bright hallways of the asylum. She had heard the scuttlebutt going around that he had actually spoken in the presence of the new psychiatrist - sounded like he was petrified of the man or something - but she hadn't honestly believed it. But this?! For him to leave his room? In all the time he had been here, she could not remember a time when he had willingly left of his own volition. She couldn't help but wonder what was so incredible about this new psychiatrist after all.

  
Lucifer walked closer to Sam, seemingly becoming the young man's shadow, and he bristled any time a person set eyes on his charge, almost protectively, definitely possessively. The entire time they walked through the large, echoing hallways with their bright windows and whitewashed walls, he whispered encouraging words in dulcet tones, promises of how perfect Sam was, how he was better than this mindless rabble, how Lucifer would never leave him alone in this hell hole. There was a comforting aura about him in that moment, as if, had Sam looked back, the two of them would have been blanketed in a pair of wings, shielding them from the view of the roving eyes and blank stares of the other inhabitants of the asylum.

  
Sam never would've admitted it, but he was so thankful that Lucifer was there. He listened to him intently, his words and tone soothing him as he walked through the halls of the asylum, ignoring the haunted stares that he was met with, ignoring when people turned to look at him with no faces, just skin stretched taunt over lifeless skulls. He followed the nurse as she stood in front of an office door, knocking three times before smiling warmly at Sam, informing him that Nick was nearly done with a patient. Sam nodded before peering inside the occupied office.

  
Was this really the same man who almost everyone thought must have permanent brain damage from how obstinately silent he was, how thoroughly he avoided meeting your gaze or acknowledging your presence? She shook her head in disbelief and gave him a real smile, dimples forming in the hollows of her cheeks, "Just wait here on this seat until his patient leaves, and then you can go in, alright Sam?" She nodded to him and then had to hurry off, looking back over her shoulder one last time though, still flummoxed by this strange turn of events.

  
He nodded at her, noticing the smile on her face. They must've all thought he was pretty damn messed up if a little forced interaction caused such a reaction. But then as she was walking away he noticed a shift about her, reality slipping around her like an air foil, and a darkness just under her skin. He was certain that if she turned back to look at him, her face would have changed, that something dark hid inside her. So what if they thought he was crazy? Because they were the ones whose bodies changed and faces melted off and moved through the walls and climbed along the ceilings. He might have been crazy, but at least he wasn’t like them.

  
He took a seat cautiously, looking around the waiting area. The change of scenery unsettled him, and he took deep breaths to calm himself.

  
Lucifer seated himself next to Sam, eyes glancing around the sparsely decorated waiting room. What decorations it did have were largely what you would have expected, all geared to be nonthreatening, calming; paintings with rounded corners of landscapes or still lifes, and on the far wall was a tapestry depicting a Bhaiṣajyaguru, a healing Buddha, with his left hand holding a lapis-colored medicine jar. The fallen angel smirked; at least it was better than those asinine paintings of toddler cherubim that so many people were fond of. He whispered his thoughts to Sam, as if speaking too loud would disturb more than just the quiet of the waiting room.

  
Sam listened intently, every word calming him down a little bit more. He was already beginning to miss the safety of his room, the familiarity. In there the rules were simple, and his room only ever changed in the smallest of ways, like the ceiling tiles. Out here, well, he really had no idea what to expect. And he noticed the change in Lucifer’s demeanor, the overpowering need to protect Sam. He remembered that from before the Asylum when Sam would talk to his brother and Lucifer would bristle in the back seat. He remembered how that feeling had filled him just before… well…"What should I say to this guy?" he asked him quietly, trying to distract himself from thinking, looking around to make sure nobody was looking their way.

  
Sitting back in his chair and leaning his head against the wall, Lucifer tapped his forefinger against his mouth, musing, "Don't give it too much thought, or it will start to sound scripted. I'll be there, so if you can't think of anything, don't worry, I'll slip you a line." He looked sidelong at Sam and scrunched his face in a sort of smile that might have been a sneer at the same time, "Maybe by talking with him, we'll figure out why your subconscious materialized him... Ah."

  
The door to the office opened and a patient shuffled out, slippers two sizes two large threatening to trip the addled woman.

  
Pointing at the open door with an infectious grin, he said, "Here's your cue. Break a leg, bunk buddy."

  
Sam rolled his eyes and took a deep breath, getting up to walk into the office. If he thought the waiting area was bad, this was so much worse. The office was decorated with paintings and posters with mottos he was sure were meant to be inspiring, but instead they just made him want to vomit more than he already did. He looked over at Nick, who was an exact replica of Lucifer, except for the clothes on his back. Sam sighed and took a seat on the sofa opposite him, waiting for him to initiate a conversation.

  
Lucifer sprawled out on the window sill and watched the two from half lidded eyes, a sharp contrast to the hawk-like concentration of his glare that kept focusing on the human who seemed in almost all respects to be his exact double.

  
Nikolai Woland looked up from his paperwork as Sam entered the room, closing a manila folder and tapping it a few times, settling the papers inside, perhaps a nervous habit as he thought of how to best approach the young man who had screamed at him earlier that day. Opening one of his desk drawers, he placed the folder inside and drew out Sam's own file, a much weightier tome, and opened it, leafing through a few of the pages. "Well Sam, I have to say, I'm honestly a little surprise to see you here this afternoon. Pleasantly surprise, but... surprised nonetheless."

  
Looking up at the younger man, his gaze was again that calm, collected glance that gave away very little as to his thoughts. His accent, when he spoke again, was subtly different from Lucifer's, but the voice itself was the same. "Seeing as this is our first session and from your records I've gathered that you're not exactly a conversationalist, how about this... Would it make it easier if I ask you a question and you get to ask me a question in return? That way you won’t have to do all the talking."

  
Sam looked over at Lucifer, then back at Nick cautiously. There was something different about the two of them, but he couldn't put his finger on what it was. He noticed the glare on Lucifer's face was aimed at Nick and not at him, and he relaxed a little but not too much. If Lucifer decided that Nick was a threat…

  
He nodded at Nick's offer, figuring it was fair enough. That way he could figure some things out, as well.

  
Nikolai pulled his fountain pen from behind his ear and uncapped it, placing it against the blank piece of stationary that he had next to Sam's file. Then he looked up at Sam in a motion so familiar to how Lucifer did, through half lidded eyes, but his gaze was neutral and unassuming, "Sam, do you know why you're in here?"

  
Lucifer slipped his legs from the sill where he'd had them crossed at the ankles and stalked over behind the man, wanting to be able to observe what he was writing. Cocking his head to the side in a decidedly avian manner, he frowned and watched the psychiatrist tap the paper lightly with the nib, a light black blot of ink forming on the white expanse of paper. He looked over at Sam and smirked, "Doesn't believe in any foreplay, does he? Just gets right to the main event?" He scoffed lightly, but there was a smile in his tone that was obviously there for Sam's amusement, "He could have at least bought you dinner first."

  
Sam let out a small laugh at Lucifer's comment, but then cleared his throat as he realized Nick was staring at him. God, the resemblance to Lucifer really was creepy. They even had the same stare. "Cause I don't know the difference between what's real and what's not." he said simply, sounding a lot more confident than he expected to. He racked his brain for an appropriate question to ask Nick, deciding on the most obvious one first of all. "Who are you? Really?"

  
Lucifer purred at Sam, sitting on the back corner of Nick's desk and resumed his watch over the interaction between the two, a silent, invisible support if needed.  
Nikolai rubbed the stubble on his chin as he thought about Sam's response, and then dropped the hand and crossed his arms on the table as he thought of how to answer the man's question. "I doubt you mean that in the existential." His lips tweaked, a small smile pulling at one corner, and he continued, "As I said before, my name is Nikolai Woland, but you're more than welcome to call me Nick. I have some critical acclaim in my field because I helped the police track down two serial killers through profiling and wrote several journals that got noticed by the academic community. I practiced in a rather large asylum over in Petersburg for about 10 years before transferring here..."

  
"Hmmm..." Lucifer had noticed a slight change in the man's demeanor when he'd mentioned his transfer and he leaned closer, sniffing the air as if it could avail him the answers he sought. "Wonder what prompted him to transfer? Sounds like everything was going well for him where he was, wouldn't you say?" He rolled his head on his shoulder to look back at Sam. “Do you think something went wrong?” The way he asked the question was almost predatory, an excited hunger at understanding this enigmatic man.

  
Writing down a few notes, Nick quietly resumed, "When you say that you can't distinguish between what is real and what isn't, what exactly do you mean? Would you mind being more specific on that?"

  
Sam watched as a portion of Nick’s face fell off, exposing muscle that was slowly decaying, patches of necrotic tissue host to maggots. He tried shaking his head, but Nick’s face resolutely remained a deteriorating mess. When bone started to show through, he gave up looking at the man and stared down at his toes as he pulled his legs up against him on the couch. “I see things, living things, dead things, things…” Sam shrugged and shook his head again, a ringing was starting up and he had a sneaking suspicion that it was from the maggots.

  
Of course, he’d never heard of maggots that sang like that, for the longer he listened to their ringing, the more keenly aware he was of their song. Shrill voices like shattering glass chimed in here and there amongst the ringing, in a language that Sam didn’t understand. There were so many possibilities of what they could be singing about, like flesh or work or bones long cleaned. Although that didn’t seem fair to Sam, thinking their song was only about their meal, perhaps they…

  
His mind stopped as he noticed a maggot had climbed up onto his foot. It stared at him with its strange white head, no eyes to be seen in the bulbous mass, and then it looked down at the skin of his leg. “No.” he whispered. “I don’t have any dead flesh you’d like.” It wasn’t quite terror that coursed through Sam as the maggot eyed him like dinner, but a restrained excitement. Had he been tortured so long at the hands of Lucifer that you could ring a bell and make him salivate for more? The maggot was just about to test and see if he was tasty when Lucifer was suddenly beside him, swiping it away angrily.

  
The sudden proximity of Lucifer caused Sam to shrink back into the couch in surprise. Lucifer looked at him with unreadable eyes and brushed a strand of his bangs back behind his ear and leaned in to whisper, “Sam… SAM.”

  
Sam looked up and saw Nick staring at him, or he supposed that was Nick. The maggots had finished off all of his skin and most of the muscle. His eyes were long gone, although a few corded bundles of nerves dangled from one of the sockets.

  
“Sam, can you hear me?”

  
He nodded.

  
“You zoned out there for a bit. Were you… seeing things?”

  
It was oddly comforting, now that Nick didn’t have Lucifer’s face. The skull wasn’t a terrible thing to look at either, and he wondered if it would still be warm from having been ensconced within his muscle and flesh not five minutes before, or if it had already cooled with the outside air. Lucifer snapped his fingers next to Sam’s ear to help him focus; now lying over the back of the couch, a hand protectively twisted into the fabric at his shoulder. “Yes.” he replied simply, wondering if Nick would be interested to know that the maggots were working their way down his throat and that some others had come out from the back of his right hand. Would people appreciate being alerted to the fact that all their dead flesh was being eaten off of them? He supposed because it was necrotic, that must be why Nick hadn’t noticed, it didn’t have feeling anymore.

  
Nick wrote down more notes, his pen making quiet noises as it scraped across the paper. He didn’t seem to notice when one of his fingernails fell off or when his ink began to be smeared by his blood.

  
Sam looked behind him to Lucifer and pleaded silently with his eyes. Sometimes Lucifer could force reality to make sense for Sam, could use some trick to keep everything from dancing away and coming to life. All he received though was a somber smile from Lucifer and hungry kiss upon his brow.

  
“I wish I could, Sammy…”

  
He almost sounded sorry, but that wasn’t right, because Lucifer was never the one who apologized.

  
“Sam.” The voice that wasn’t Lucifer’s chimed in, and Sam tore himself away to look back at Nick, who now had a moth eating at his lab coat. “Sam?”

  
“Sorry…” Sam replied, and he wasn’t sure to whom that was directed.

  
“It’s your turn to ask me a question.” Nikolai’s voice was tinnier now, resounding hollow as his ribs started to show through the maggots. His hand had stilled over its paper again, the page entirely covered in smears of blood, completely illegible.

  
“I… um…” Sam’s eyes kept trying to find somewhere on Nick to look that wasn’t horrific, but everywhere his eyes fell seemed to be worse than the last. Finally he settled on looking at a small crystal paperweight on the very edge of his desk. “Why did you leave your last job?” he finally got out, remembering Lucifer’s keen interest.

  
Nick seemed taken aback at the question, his body posture stiffening slightly. His skeletal face really didn’t give much away. But then again, faces generally weren’t where people showed their true intentions, thoughts, feelings, distresses. No, that was more in the hands, eyes occasionally, or the way they shifted their weight. “I… I was injured by a patient.”

  
Lucifer leapt from the back of the couch, “He’s lying.” Whirling around he grabbed ahold of Sam’s shoulders and whispered, “He’s lying. Don’t you see?”

  
“Why are you lying?”

  
Nick had still been explaining his story, but at Sam’s question his words fell silent. “What? What makes you think I would lie to you, Sam?”

  
“That’s what I’d like to know.” Sam replied with a cruel edge to his voice. It felt good to have something solid to focus on, and he could hear the smallest trace of unease in Nick’s voice. Thankfully Lucifer had pointed it out; because now that he knew it was there he could read the man like a polygraph. Subtle shifts in his tonal inflection, an increase in sweating where he still had skin, words blooming over his skeleton in bright angry crimson. If he could stare long enough those words would solidify and he was sure that he’d be able to read the honest account of why Nick had left and what had happened.

  
“Sam, now be reasonable. You can’t go accusing someone of lying.” Nick’s accent was the slightest bit more noticeable just then, as he tried to think how to respond without angering his patient further.

  
Sam hated that tone of voice. He heard it from everyone who talked to him in here. “I’m not accusing you of lying, I’m just stating facts.” There were more words to speak, right on the tip of his tongue, when he felt a maggot inside his cheek. His eyes flew wide as it bit into the soft, moist tissue and started to bury into his face. And as it moved he could feel more of them crawling up his throat and burying into his mouth, his tongue, his palate. Their teeth scraping against the bone as their saliva sterilized wherever they went. It was only as Nick came over and began shaking him, maggots falling out of his empty sockets where they’d been resting that he realized he’d been screaming.

  
Lucifer was holding onto him, and the world had lost all of its sound.

  
Orderlies came into the room, but they were running in slow motion as they slid to their knees in front of Sam and grabbed his arm, finding a vein, plunging a hypodermic needle in that looked more like a child’s tibia sharpened and hollowed. It was only as the darkness came that Sam realized he’d bit through his own tongue and the reason he couldn’t talk was the blood gushing out of his mouth. He wondered if the maggots would leave his tongue in tact enough to be sewn back on.

 

* * *

  
When Sam woke up he was in the infirmary and his mouth was stuffed with cotton. His head felt a bit like it was stuffed with cotton as well, but he couldn’t tell if it was the regular kind or the kind made from sugar.

“I’ll kill him.”

Sam raised his head just slightly, looking over to see Lucifer pacing back and forth next to his bed. Resting his head back against the pillow, he turned to get a better look at the agitated man.

Lucifer instantly noticed that Sam had awoken and turned to look at Sam. “I will kill him.” he stated again, slower this time, more of a promise than a wild outbreak. There was a dangerous fire in his eyes that burned cold and froze the light in the room so that the shadows stopped moving. “If it wasn’t for him those maggots would never have gotten in.”

Raising a weary eyebrow, Sam was surprised to hear that. Then… Nick had brought them in?

“Of course he did.” he shot back, always seemingly able to tell what Sam was thinking whether he vocalized it or not. “Do you see anyone else getting their flesh devoured by maggots? No. And I had promised myself that I’d keep you safe while we left.” Lucifer had never appreciated others hurting Sam, looking at him, caring for him. He was as jealous as he was twistedly protective of Sam, and the times when he’d slip into the insanity and roaring madness were when he felt that Sam was safe from the outside world. No one else had ever been around when Lucifer tortured Sam.

Sam motioned towards his mouth and noticed that there was an IV in the bend of his elbow that made his veins feel cold, sluggish like ice water.

Calming himself, Lucifer seemed to ruffle like a bird, feathers settling back into place by force of habit. “They seemed to think that your tongue was dead, so they chewed it off. The staff here decided the maggots were wrong and sewed it back on.” His lip twitched up at the corner, finding something about the situation funny. “They can’t seem to agree on it.”

Control.

That’s what it seemed to be about with Lucifer. When they were in a situation where he felt he was in control, he felt safe enough to treat Sam with the entire spectrum of his myriad emotions. But when faced with the outside world, with the threats that other people possessed, he drew himself about Sam like a suit of armor, defending him from all perceived dangers.

“You’re thinking about me?” There was a twinge of surprise there as Lucifer perched on a chair he’d turned backwards. “Worried I’d do more to you in here?” His eyes gazed about the room, landing on each and every single medical instrument that he could use for torturing Sam. The change in his disposition was nearly instantaneous. “Well, there certainly are a lot of fun toys in here. We could enjoy ourselves for days, just testing each one out.” Picking up a scalpel, he turned it so the metal glinted in the harsh electric lights. “You might not be able to talk right now, but I’ll bet I could still make you scream. Would you like that Sammy?”

Sam’s eyes were drawn to the scalpel, mesmerized by it. He felt his body go colder still, the air in the room practically glacial. It wasn’t that he wanted Lucifer to torture him, gods no, he never wanted that. But he couldn’t deny that at that moment the scalpel represented a sort of freedom; because what if the maggots came back and there was still dead tissue on him? He didn’t want to wake up and find more holes being eaten through his body as they found the portions of him that were dead inside.

“Ah. I could do that for you Sammy. Cut away everything that they’ve let die while you’re in here. All the times the food they served you wasn’t good enough to keep your skin alive or not enough to feed all of your brain cells.” Lucifer practically purred, his head resting on the back of the chair. He reached over and trailed the dull end of the surgical blade over Sam’s arm, trialing goose pimples in its wake.

There… couldn’t be all that much that was dead, right?

“Oh baby, you really don’t believe that do you?” Lucifer stood up and secured the restraints about Sam’s wrists, ankles and head. “The most important parts of you died a long time ago. Sometimes I think that I’m the only thing keeping you together. But don’t you worry, Sam,” Lucifer patted his hand, emphasizing the words, “because I’m never going to leave you alone.”

That thought shouldn’t have been comforting, but Lucifer was his only friend. And as bad as Lucifer could get, the prospect of being completely alone was a million times worse.

“Oh Sam, I didn’t realize that. I’ll be sure to never leave you to face this world by yourself. But first,” there was a bloom of pain near Sam’s solar plexis, “I’m going to need to give you a heart transplant, because that’s been dead for a long time. But don’t worry; I’ll give you mine in exchange. Then the maggots won’t touch you again.”  
The scalpel cut through his skin and flesh like butter, so thin that there almost wasn’t any pain. Lucifer used a set of retractors to hold the incision open, his hands inserting them with practiced ease. Then there came the metallic clink as he placed the scalpel on the tray and picked up a pair of rib shears, “Now this might sting a little…” Pain wracked Sam’s body as Lucifer separated several of the ribs on his left side, pulling them back to expose his naked heart.

Sam hadn’t noticed the change, hadn’t noticed the stillness in his chest, but he noticed it now in its absence as Lucifer placed his own beating heart into Sam’s chest; having already cut away and removed the calcified mass of Sam’s own heart. Arteries and veins were expertly sewn back together, blood vessels that before spilled into his chest cavity were rejoined with startling ease. The pain from the surgery itself was nothing compared to having Lucifer’s heart beating in his chest, muscles surrounding the organ long atrophied were woken from their slumber and taxed to the extreme. Lucifer’s heart beat faster than his had used to, faster than any human would have need for.

“It’s because I used to fly.” Lucifer muttered in response as he soldered Sam’s ribs back into place and put great screws through the bone and metal plates to make sure they would grow together straight and whole. He wiped some of the blood off his face from when an artery had begun squirting before he’d gotten it clamped off. His face was set, determined as he used a medical dremel to carve his name into Sam’s ribs, each and every single one.

The thrumming vibration from the dremel cut through the pain, a fizzy sort of sensation that made Sam’s teeth hurt. He wished deliriously that Lucifer had used anesthetic, because the pain was nearly unbearable. But at least the cold of his touch numbed Sam’s body to an extent, or else he suspected would have passed out from the pain already.

“There…” Lucifer set the dremel down, blood and bone caking the tip. He unfastened the retractors and watched with a morbid fixation as the skin collapsed back in, like the string of a bow snapping back after the arrow had fired. And as the angel sewed sutures into Sam’s flesh and closed the protective womb that held the heart in place, Sam idly found poetic justice that Lucifer had cut him open along the old scar that Dean had given him as a child when playing doctor. He hadn’t meant to hurt Sammy, Dean really hadn’t, the knife had slipped, honest.

When Lucifer was done he released Sam’s restraints and moved Sam’s hand over the wound and placed it down so he could feel Lucifer’s heart beating in his chest, warm blood still coating his hand. “You are mine, bunk buddy, and every time that heart beats, I want you to remember that. I’m never going to leave you alone, I’m never going to leave… period.” he promised this with a feral tenacity, all power and rage and fury and threat. It was a sick kind of love born of desperation and torture and depravity.

Sam had never felt so whole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I could still use a beta for this story if anyone is interested... 
> 
> Hopefully this chapter didn't scare everyone off.


	3. Don’t Look into the Grave of the Fireflies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wanted to get this posted before the new year, so I'm still actually waiting on my beta to get back to me. Will be edited as soon as I can.

Sam awoke to a dull throb along his sternum and the fluttering beats of Lucifer’s heart in his chest. It was certainly an odd thing to have that organ residing inside of him. There was something about it, the way it filtered his blood or maybe the way it beat too fast and pumped too hard, that had him feeling better than he had in a long time.

“Well it _is_ a piece of me, after all, so of course it would be better than a meager human heart.” Lucifer said from his corner of the room, sprawled out on the counter. He idly played with a tongue depressor, tumbling and twirling it between his fingers.   
  
            “Ish…” Sam coughed, his throat protesting after almost two days of no use.

            A cup of water was thrust into his face, “Water, Sleeping Beauty?”

            Sam gently pushed himself up a little on the hospital bed so that he was sitting up, before he nodded and took the waxed paper cup, careful to get a good grip on it. His mouth still felt thick and stuffed, tongue obviously still swollen, but as he sipped the cool water, some of that cleared up. Perhaps it had just been thirst and a dry mouth. Tentatively trying to speak again, he found it wasn’t too impossible, although it was plenty painful and he had a rather annoying lisp. “So you thaid I wath out for two dayth?”

            He glared when Lucifer snickered at him.

            “Yes, yes. But you can’t deny that you sound ridiculous.” Waving a hand at any more protestations from Sam, he went on to actually answer his question. “You were unconscious for two days. The doctors think it was because of the trauma that you suffered during your counseling session.”

            Raising an eyebrow, Sam nodded for Lucifer to say what he thought it was.

            “Well, I think it was because of my heart. It’s not uncommon for the body to take a while to adjust to new organs, now is it?” He asked Sam as if the poor man had any idea. “You will probably still have a few… hiccups with it before it’s totally settled into its new home.”

            “’Ow will you thurvive withouth a ‘eart?” Something in the back of Sam’s mind told him that no one could live without a heart, not even Lucifer, but a much louder voice repeated the mantra that Lucifer held the most control over reality of anyone he’d ever met. If Lucifer wanted to live without a heart, to give his away to save Sam, he would find a way. Wouldn’t he?

            “I’ll survive as long as it beats in your chest.” And there was the possessiveness again, as he leaned close and traced a finger over the bandage. “Besides, you’ve always considered me heartless, now I just get to prove you right.”

            Sam didn’t like that thought. He might have thought Lucifer was cruel and capricious, but never completely heartless, not after all the times when Lucifer had…

            He was drawn away from his thoughts by a hand snapping next to his ear. “Are we back in the world of the living?” It was Dr. Nikolai Woland, his reserved smile greeting Sam. “We were worried about you for a while there.”

            “I’ll just bet you were.” Lucifer chided, face darkened by his sudden anger. “But you were the one who caused all of this. Bringing those filthy maggots with you.”

            When Sam didn’t respond, Nick shifted his weight and pulled away slightly, standing up straight again. “Yes, well… can you hear me Sam?”

            “Oh, just talk to the imbecile, otherwise he’ll fill you full of drugs again and we both know how much fun that is…”

            Sam _hated_ the drugs they tried to put him on at first, before they thought that he was a quiet, harmless soul and largely left him alone. Those drugs had made him feel disconnected and he could never focus for long enough to catch what Lucifer was saying. They made him feel like he was underwater, being tossed about by the surf and the waves; everything distant and never enough air. They made his skin rise up off his muscles like so many centipedes and try to crawl away. They made his veins feel like they were filled with pop rocks and soda, fizzing and crackling painfully so that he’d once tried to expose the treacherous arteries and flush them out.

            They’d restrained him to a bed after that, to keep him from self-harm.

            Lucifer had had a field day with all the fun tortures he could exact.

            They’d given up restraining him when they continually found he had somehow slipped his bindings and injured himself again. When they came in one day and discovered that he had bitten into his own arm, removing a large chunk of flesh and nearly bleeding out, they finally decided that it might be the medication that was causing him to act up so badly, when he’d been so placid before.

            They hadn’t put him on those medications again.

            Sam never learned what they had been meant for, people never thought to explain such things to a patient. When he’d been on them, he hadn’t cared enough to ask.

            “Sam, he’s starting to get that worried look in his eye.” Lucifer poked Sam in the side sharply, effectively bringing him out of his thoughts, although also causing him to jerk slightly which looked odd to Nick.

            With an effort, Sam focused on his psychiatrist’s face and nodded. “I can ‘ear you.” Talking hurt, but it was worth it when he saw some of the concern bleed out of Nick’s eyes. Anything to not have more drugs pumped into him.

            Nick blew out a breath, running a hand through his hair absently. “That’s good to hear, really good to hear. After that episode in my office, and then you cut yourself open, well… I was worried you might have had a catatonic break and fallen into a coma.” He sounded honestly worried.

But that couldn’t be right, because why would this man who had only known Sam for less than a week care if he was in a coma or not? No. People never cared about Sam, besides Dean, and Lucifer on occasion.

Sam just nodded, so preoccupied by his confusion that he nearly missed it when the lights over his head flicked and turned into a cloud of fireflies, causing the sterile fluorescent light to morph into a warmer, natural illumination. They seemed very conscientious and considerate though, because they took turns for lighting their abdomens and turning them off, so that the room never plunged into complete darkness.

“Thorry…”

“You have nothing to apologize for.” Nick replied, his voice laced with that pity that everyone treated Sam with, as if he was some fragile thing that would shatter into a million pieces. Or perhaps they knew that he’d already shattered.

“But I need to ask you, do you know why you tried to cut open your chest? Why you sewed sutures through that old wound?” He sounded like a lion tamer, careful and quiet, and endlessly gentle.

Sam wanted to tell Nick that he had not cut himself open, nor had he sewn up those sutures, but he knew how that would sound. He’d never told anyone about Lucifer. He’d never wanted to finally have to find out if Lucifer was real or not. He’d never trusted anyone enough to let them know.

And he’d ruined his trust with Dean the day he’d choked him.

So instead Sam shook his head slowly, gaze falling from the doctor’s face and down to his own hands fisted in his sheets.

“We can’t have you harming yourself like this, Sam. It makes you a terrible danger to yourself…” _And others._ The weight of the unspoken words choked them both.

Opening his mouth, Sam found that his voice was robbed by the darkness of the room, it slipped into his mouth and coated his throat. His tongue was throbbing and the darkness was so cold that he couldn’t catch a proper breath, just these terrible gasping things that hurt to hear and hurt to take in.

Nick’s eyes were filled with a terrible sorrow as he gazed down at Sam, a poor broken soul, shattering before his very eyes. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out.”

The machines attached to Sam began beeping wildly, wild dogs howling and gnashing their teeth in delight. They chased Sam’s heartbeat and cornered his blood pressure. The beeping filled the silence, but then even that was swallowed by the darkness.

Perhaps Nick’s voice had been stolen by the darkness as well.

The fireflies started to spend longer and longer periods unlit, and the room was thrown into deeper and deeper shadows as they died, falling to the ground. Sam was sorry to see them go; sorry to see them die, swallowed up by the tide of darkness rising from the floor.

Lucifer reached forward and closed Sam’s eyes, pushing the man back down against the bed as he whispered dangerous, cryptic warnings, “Don’t look, Sammy. Don’t look into the grave of the fireflies.”

He wanted to.

“Sam… Sam?” Nick was calling to him, but it sounded like he was on the other side of the tide of darkness.

Sam was slipping under the waves, but it was alright because he was already filled with it. So he knew how to survive under its crushing weight and chilling depths. He’d been filled with nothing but the darkness for so long.

But he could no longer hide inside it because Lucifer’s heart was beating in his chest, and maybe it was the heart itself or the fact that it was the flesh of an angel – even fallen – but it shown dimly in the darkness. The Morningstar had given Sam his heart and the light it gave off was so cold, so beautiful that it hurt: like the silence after the bombs, or the rain that falls on scorched forests, or a supernova in the depths of space.

“See? I knew you’d take to my heart just fine…” Lucifer quietly intoned.

“Alright… I’ll… I’ll be back to check on you later.” Nick finally said, but Sam wasn’t paying enough attention to parse what Nick felt from the words, what they really meant.

They would put him on medication after this. Of that he was quite certain. But with his eyes closed, Lucifer’s hand covering them, he could see the world as lines of energy pumping through each of them, could see that angel heart beating in his chest, and he couldn’t bring himself to care.

* * *

            Two weeks had passed before they deemed Sam well enough to return to his room, finally leaving the confines of the infirmary, with its fluorescent lighting that made everything feel cold and clinical. His tongue had healed some, well on its way to normal, and talking was no longer so painful or difficult. The only real evidence left that he’d spent the time in there at all was the bandage over the healing wound on his chest.

            No matter how many times they asked, Sam never once explained it to them.

            Lucifer’s heart inside him was doing something to him. He wasn’t quite sure how to explain it, but he felt stronger, bolder. When Lucifer had stepped over lines that Sam had long forgotten setting, he’d fought back, much harder than he had in years. When Lucifer sat beside him and spoke in hushed tones after the lights had gone out, he found himself able to feel a joy that he was certain had been choked out by whitewashed walls and locked doors.

            He felt like he was coming alive again after being dead for so long, or perhaps like waking up after years asleep.

            It hurt.

            Everything was brighter, more colorful, louder. Words cut deeper and wounds lasted longer. But somehow it was all worth it when Sam would awake and feel that frenzied beat, assuring him of something wonderful that he had no words for.

            “So, you feel it then?”

            Sam looked up from the plastic cup he had been turning in his hand, eyes instantly drawn to the angel who was once again perched on the table at the opposite end of the room. “Feel it?” He felt stupid parroting the words back, but he wasn’t certain of what Lucifer was speaking of.

            “Yes, my Grace.” Lucifer replied simply, as if he hadn’t just dropped a bomb on Sam’s lap.

            Grace, Grace, Grace… That was an angel’s energy, no, more than that. It was practically a soul for an angel, wasn’t it? An energy source that comprised everything they were, their spiritual form, their essence. Lucifer had spoken of it once, how all angels were born with it and learned how to master it. He’d never explained why he had so little.

            “It makes life different, more.”

            Sam noted that Lucifer hadn’t said better or easier or any of those nice adjectives that he would have attributed to some Heavenly power.

            Lucifer rolled his eyes at Sam’s train of thought. “You should never equate Heaven with ease.” Pushing off from his seat, his hips lead the action until he lithely stood. “Heaven is a paradise for those who aren’t working.” Stalking over towards Sam, he leaned his hip against the wall and folded his arms. He was barely an arm’s reach from Sam.

            “So you worked in Heaven?”

            “Work is a relative term, but yes. All sorts of work to do up there. Some angels were to simply fly in front of the Father and sing his praises endlessly. Others trained the fledglings and the garrisons. While still others built and sculpted and perfected the city in Heaven.” Lucifer replied, ticking jobs off on his fingers.

            “What did you do?” Sam asked, blaming his wonder on the way the angel’s heart was beating in his chest.

            “Fell…” And there was that familiar sadness and spite with which Lucifer always regarded Heaven.

            Sam didn’t know how to respond to that; how did you try to ease pain that was perhaps billions of years old?

            “You don’t.” The fallen angel responded to Sam’s thoughts, moving off the wall and closer to Sam, sitting next to him on the bed. Lifting one leg up off the ground and settling it under him on the bed, he turned to stare straight at Sam, a dark and hungry expression deep in his icy gaze. “But it’s so sweet of you to try.” Hands reached out and pulled Sam’s face to his, lips ghosting over Sam’s forehead and down to closed eyes.

            How he wanted to believe that this was a kindhearted gesture, but so often when Lucifer got this close, all it meant was that pain would be swift to follow. But he found he was too in need of simple physical contact to care, the heart beating in his heart demanding that he draw closer to Lucifer. So he tentatively raised a hand to his sometimes friend’s waist, fingers clasping at the faded shirts. Who had last held him? Dean… Faded memories of his brother were the last pure comfort he held.

When he felt the angel draw back, he inadvertently tensed, sensing the tempest was upon him.

“You still cling to him?” Lucifer asked, voice seething and colder than space. “How many times do I have to remind you that he abandoned you here?”

And Sam felt his own anger rise in retaliation, as much as his fear, “Because I almost killed him, Lucifer! I nearly killed my brother, I can’t really blame him for staying the Hell away from me!”

It almost looked like Lucifer was going to attack him, however he calmed himself and in the most pitying of voices he replied, “Oh Sammy, I truly do not envy you the confusion you live in. You might want to consider your memories one of these days, because you’re creating your own reality where everything is so much kinder than it ever was.”

Sam’s eyes widened, shaking his head and trying to push away from the vice grip that Lucifer held on his shoulders. “No… no. How can you even say that? How can you say that this reality is kind? I almost killed my brother, I’m stuck in an asylum, most days I don’t know if the people I talk to are real and EVERYONE seems to think I’ve done or said something I never did. A kinder reality? You are…”

His tirade was silenced suddenly when Lucifer’s hands clamped around his throat and started squeezing off his oxygen, thumbs digging in to cut off his blood supply, eyes suddenly flooded with light.

“Yes, kinder. For all that you _suffer_ in here; you have no idea what you suffered out there. What I protected you from!” Lucifer rejoined, voice manic and eyes wild.

If Sam didn’t know better, he would have thought the angel was afraid, afraid that he wasn’t able to protect Sam now. But that didn’t make any sense.

Sam only needed protection from Lucifer, didn’t he?

Suddenly his body was twitching, spasming as his brain screamed for oxygen, gagging against the pressure on his throat. Eyes rolling back up into his head, Sam couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t hold onto anything beside the deadly quiet voice of Lucifer in his ear, whispering obscenities and promising him forever, an unholy guardian angel who avenged sins of a past that he claimed Sam couldn’t remember.

His last thought as he slipped into the all too familiar arms of unconsciousness was why he hated himself so much that even Lucifer would reinforce it…

* * *

            _Sam is with John, standing on the wrap around porch, shade from the leafy bows of the oak high overhead covering them. He is eight years old and all he wants is to make John smile. But John never smiles anymore, not that he’s ever seen. So he has a plan, he’ll listen as well as he possibly can to how he’s supposed to hold the pistol and what sights he focuses on to hit the target, and then he’ll hit one of the cans dead center and show it to John and his father will smile at him._

_John’s telling Sam how damned important it is to always keep your weapon clean, because your tools and your wits are all that you have when you’re up against the enemy, bullets whizzing by your head. So you better learn to clean this pistol. After only a minute of the briefest instructions John finally drops the large handgun into Sam’s hands and stumbles back into his house, looking for his next bottle of beer, or glass of something stronger._

_So Sam stands on the porch with the pistol that he can’t remember the make of and the terrible assurance that he didn’t really catch anywhere near enough of John’s words. However he’s driven off the porch by his need to make his father proud, to make anyone proud of him, tiny feet silent as he walks into their backyard where they have a shooting range set up for practicing._

_After what seems like hours, but was likely no more than minutes, Sam has managed to miss the soda can every single time. He can’t remember ever being so frustrated with himself, feeling so useless. And he’s sore from the gun as it pushes into him and strains his tiny muscles over and over again. If Dean was home, maybe he could sneak in and ask for help, but he vaguely remembers that John had sent Dean off on some mission, probably to get groceries. It’s been a while since they’d had anything more than ramen in the house and he thinks that a teacher of his a few states back had stressed something about how ramen wasn’t enough to keep people healthy._

_Could that be why he’s so bad with this pistol? Is he not healthy enough to do it? Is his stomach too empty? Sam feels the familiar sting in his eyes, tears welling up but not quite spilling over as he stares, unblinking, at the can on the fence._

_“It might have more to do with the fact that you’re not holding the gun right…” Whispers a voice on the wind._

_Sam whirls around and see’s Lucifer leaning against the railing of the porch, easy smile bringing out the mischievous twinkle in his eyes._

_“So John didn’t take enough time to even help you fire off a round or two?” The older boy asks with quiet curiosity. “Surprise, surprise.”_

_Lucifer is Sam’s only friend, but that’s alright because he’s the best friend anyone could ever want._

_His eight year old mind isn’t bothered by the fact that no one else ever talks to Lucifer, or the fact that it doesn’t matter how many times they move, because Lucifer finds him every time._

_None of those sorts of details matter because Lucifer is Sam’s best friend who always knows how to do everything right and always takes the time to help Sam learn. No one else ever has time for Sammy._

_“Come on, all you have to do is ask for some help…” Lucifer prompts, pushing off of the porch languidly and walking over. “Do you want my help, Sammy?”_

            _Sam nods so hard that his bangs fall into his eyes and he has to blow them away, “Yeah, Luce, I really do.”_

_Chuckling softly to himself, Lucifer walks up to Sam; but his smile falters slightly when he notices the shine in Sam’s eyes, and he gets down on his knees and wipes the tears away, so very gentle, and that’s what breaks Sam’s heart. People aren’t gentle with him in his family. People don’t really notice him in his family. “Hey now, Sammy, what’s wrong?”_

_But Sam won’t tell him, not out here where anyone could come down and see him crying, so he shakes his head and stubbornly denies that they’re tears at all._

_So Lucifer drops it and smiles again, “Alright, how about I teach you how to hold this, eh?”_

_For the next ten minutes, his friend guides his hands, showing Sam how to hold the pistol in his smaller grip and how to turn off the safety and how to hold it out straight enough that he can look down the iron sights and line up his shot. But the gun really is too heavy for Sam, so Lucifer folds himself around Sam back and places his hands over Sammy’s to help him steady the pistol. And before they start squeezing off slow and deliberate rounds, he’s explaining recoil and calming Sam by assuring him that he’ll brace the gun so Sam won’t have to feel a thing._

_Then a miracle happens, with Lucifer’s help he hits the soda can with a metallic pin and the can goes sailing through the air, before being awkwardly caught by wind and gravity and falling to the ground further out into the field. Sam’s eyes are wide as he twists around to look at Lucifer, “Did you see that? Did you?! We hit it!”_

_Lucifer smiles down at him and lets go with one hand so he can ruffle Sammy’s hair, “No kid, you hit it.”_

_“Fine…” Sam concedes with boyish reluctance, “but you helped.”_

_“Well? Aren’t you gonna go get it and show it to your dad?” His friend asks, lightly pushing him forward._

_And Sam can’t help but be afraid that Lucifer will leave now that he’s helped Sam, so his steps falter before he’s made it more than a few feet. Looking back he pleads with his eyes, trying to keep his tone even, controlled, “You’re… you’re gonna go in with me, right?”_

_“If you need me to.”_

_Sam doesn’t know if he needs Lucifer there but, “I want you to.”_

_Throwing up his hands in the air, the older boy smirks, “Alright, alright. I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Sammy.” And his eyes are so warm as they watch Sam turn around and run into the tall grass, hunting for his prized target. A few moments later he watches as Sam thrusts his hand into the air over the tall stalks, holding the punctured can high._

_So into the house they go, Sam always running ahead but then stopping to look back and check that Lucifer is coming, always with the smallest trace of fear in his eyes that one of these times he’ll look back and find himself alone. But Lucifer is always there, and his smirk always spreads into a real smile when Sam looks back at him, reassuring him silently that he’s not going to leave as long as Sam wants him there._

_Inside the house is dark, shutters and blinds and drapes all closed against the afternoon light; John doesn’t like a lot of light in the house whenever he’s been drinking. Sam isn’t quite sure why, but Dean once said it was because what John drinks makes his eyes really sensitive, so Sam’s gotten used to moving in the dark. He’s not even afraid of the dark anymore, not even when his room has a closet door that creaks in the night._

_His little fingers are clutching the can as tightly as he can, making sure he won’t drop it while he makes his way past abandoned bottles and cans and regular debris that John doesn’t care to pick up anymore. Dean does any cleaning, but he’s been awfully grumpy the past few days, so nothings been cleaned at all._

_John told Sam that he’s not supposed to touch the bottles and cans, or something very bad will happen to him. He doesn’t know what, but he promised he wouldn’t, and so he has to be extra careful tiptoeing through the mine field of discarded waste. Lucifer never seems to have a problem stepping around the booby-trapped house, silently following in Sam’s wake._

_He finally finds John passed out in front of the television, screen showing nothing but static as the home video had reached its end an hour ago; but it’s no big deal, he can show the can to John when he wakes up._

_Somehow Lucifer knows that it_ is _a big deal, that he was hoping he’d be proud of him, just this once, as he steps up behind Sam and wraps his arms over his quivering shoulders protectively._

_“Hey now, you can’t let them see you were crying, not down here. How about you show it to Dean? He’ll be happy to see how well you’re doing, right?” Lucifer’s voice is calm and soothing, just like what Sam’s always imagined a guardian angel might sound like._

_Sam sniffles and swipes at his eyes with the back of his sleeve, “Yeah…”_

_But when Sam finally finds Dean, his older brother is staring into empty cupboards with a garbage bag full of beer cans and bottles. He doesn’t look happy, but maybe Sam can make him happy with the news of how good a shot he made._

_“Hey Dean, get this, I hit the can target that…”_

_Dean whirls around and interrupts him, a livid bruise blossoming over his left eye, “Go to your room Sam. I don’t have time to babysit you right now. I have to get this place cleaned up before Dad wakes up.”_

_“But…”_

_“Go!” Dean repeats with misdirected venom in his voice, throwing out his hand to point towards the stairs, but it’s a fist instead, and it’s so close to landing on Sam._

_Sam cringes instinctively, pulling back from the hand that he was afraid would hit him, and he sees something snap in his brother’s eyes, but he’s too young to understand what’s happened or why Dean’s angry with him. So he crumples the can and throws it to the ground before turning and running for the stairs. When he pushes into his room and closes the door behind him with a thump, back resting heavy against the safety of this thin wooden barrier, he realizes that he’s left Lucifer outside. “Luce? Luce, are you still there?” He asks as he turns and whispers through the door._

_“Yeah, I’m here… you want to be alone, Sammy, or are you gonna let me in?”_

_Pulling open the door just wide enough for Lucifer to make it through, he closes it as soon as he can. He doesn’t want John or Dean to see the shameful tears that are streaking down his face. But Luce, Luce can see, because he never judges Sam for crying or for needing someone to reassure him that the monsters aren’t going to get him in the middle of the night. So Lucifer is allowed to see him like this._

_He grabs Lucifer’s hand and pulls him over to his bed, climbing into his lap when he sits down on the thin mattress. In minutes he’s soaked through the shoulder of Lucifer’s shirt, arms wrapped tightly as he tries to steady himself._

_“Hey, hey now. Sam, it’s alright. It’s gonna be alright.” Lucifer keeps up a stream of reassurances, slowly rocking the boy in his arms. “And hey, screw them. They don’t know what a wonderful job you did today. I am so proud of you, Sammy. You can’t even imagine how proud.”_

_What neither of them can see is Dean standing outside of Sam’s door, listening to a boys small sobs and staring down at his hand, horror stricken that he had almost hurt his little brother._

_And horribly intrigued._


	4. The Danger Is I'm Dangerous

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The drugs hit Sam hard and fast and he slips beneath the waves of his madness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my, it's been forever since I last updated this story. *Strokes poor mad!Sam* 
> 
> I'll proofread this in the morning. Z_z

“Lucifer? Lucifer?”

Silence.

“Come on, please…”

Silence.

“You can’t be gone…”

But no matter how many times Sam called, Lucifer didn’t answer, didn’t appear. He hadn’t shown in days and Sam was starting to get worried. There had been stretches in the past, he remembered, when they were moving and it had taken Lucifer a few days to find him again, but that didn’t make any sense now.

He hadn’t gone anywhere, was still trapped in the same four walls.

So it had to be the medication.

Had to be.

Because Lucifer wouldn’t leave him alone, not in here, not after all his promises.

Sam curled into a ball and rolled away from the door, shivering against the chill in the air, or was it a chill in his blood? His skin was starting to itch again and he expected that the old fizzle would return to his blood if they didn’t take him off the medication soon.

If Lucifer was gone…

Then he was a hallucination, wasn’t he?

No, Lucifer couldn’t be a hallucination, they’d done something to him.

Or maybe being without his heart had put too great a strain on him and he needed to go away for a while to heal up?

Well fine, that was… fine.

Sam stared at a wall but couldn’t bring himself to feel anything, the weight of the drugs in his system twisting all his thoughts around until he no longer had any that made sense. He tried falling asleep, hoping that it would fix everything, but his dreams were filled with an encroaching darkness that slowly ate away at his memories and paralyzed him, body and soul.

In his dreams he was younger, still living with John and Dean, and Lucifer was nowhere to be found in the house or the yard or the Impala out front. No matter how many times he called out for his friend, he never appeared.

And then the dream turned dark and stormy and John was gone to a bar and Dean came home.

And Lucifer still wasn’t anywhere to be found.

Lucifer’s heart wasn’t beating in his chest, not in this past memory, and suddenly Sam felt the loss of it, heartbeats slowing and fading away.

Dean was yelling something at him, but he couldn’t hear over the drowning silence, couldn’t feel the blow past the freezing cold.

Lucifer’s heart wasn’t beating.

Sam’s heart wasn’t beating.

But blood still flowed.

* * *

 “He’s gone completely catatonic.”

“Sir, if you’ve read his file then you know…”

“His vitals are dropping, we need to make a call soon.”

“Try another medication.”

“Come on Sam, stick with us.”

“There’s a heart arrhythmia, beating way too fast…”

“CLEAR!”

“We’re losing him!”

* * *

“Sam, I know the past few weeks have been quite… difficult, but how are you feeling today?” Nikolai asked, sitting behind his desk and watching Sam sit perfectly motionless on the seat across from him. The man seemed changed, something subtle that still communicated in his silence. Something was terribly wrong with Sam, and he was sure it went past the near death experience a few weeks back.

He still wasn’t sure why they’d almost lost Sam, but he knew the man had poor past experiences with certain drugs. Switching Sam to new anti-psychotics had helped, but now Sam didn’t talk at all, didn’t look at people.

He looked lost.

“Well, if you don’t want to talk today, I don’t blame you. But know I’ll be ready whenever you do feel like talking.”

Sam made no move to acknowledge that Nick had spoken.

The two men sat in silence for a few more minutes before Nick decided that he could at least get some work while Sam sat, mentally checked out. He pulled a file from his desk and began translating his notes into a little more legible scrawl, detailing symptoms and proposed treatments.

In the quiet of the room, he kept an ear open for Sam’s breaths. It was somehow disconcerting to sit in a room with the man now, which was completely irrational. Sam was simply a poor patient who had a bad reaction to his medication; there wasn’t any reason for him to suddenly be afraid of him.

But knowing that didn’t help the irrational fear niggling at his gut.

Glancing up at the clock, he noticed a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye.

Sam was standing in front of the door, rocking gently in place, slow circles.

He hadn’t heard Sam move.

“Do you want to go back to your room Sam?”

Sam made no response, simply continued swaying, eyes trained on the door, back to Dr. Woland.

“Sam?” It was likely futile to keep trying to reach the man, but he had to try, had to believe that they hadn’t somehow hurt Sam permanently with meds.

Standing up, he made his way over to Sam and laid a hand on his shoulder, meaning to guide him back to his chair. When his fingers touched the coarse linen of Sam’s shirt, he almost drew his hand back, surprised at the cold that resonated off of Sam.

“You’re freezing. Come on Sam, let’s get you sitting down and get a blanket over you.”

Sam’s head rolled forward and the man crumpled to the ground.

Something was going on inside of Sam’s head, and Dr. Woland promised himself that he would get to the bottom of it. He wasn’t going to lose another patient.

* * *

_Sam is thirteen and he hasn’t talked to anyone in ten days._

_The snow is cold as he picks his foot up and trudges forward another step, each one a little slower than the one before, a little harder to force himself forward._

_He stopped being cold a few hours ago, and he knows from Dean that that’s not a good thing. There is no doubt in his mind that he is finally going into hypothermia, the last of his dry clothes soaked through when the fresh snow fell last night. No dry wood for a fire, no food left, not a lot of hope._

_And there will be no rescue._

_Sam can’t move his fingers very well, so he balls them into fists and jams them into wet pockets, thin ice cracking as he moved the material._

_When he finally falls into the snow, there’s none of the smarting pain he was expecting, just the sound and a distant warmth._

_He just barely felt it as Lucifer wrapped his arms around him and held him close. “We’ll get you out of here, Sam.”_

_Sam wasn’t sure if he believed Lucifer this time, but he’d never lied to him before, so he held on as best he could, trying to remember to shiver as they sat back against the trunk of a tree._

* * *

   “See Sam? Isn’t the day room nice? So much brighter than your room.” The orderly asked, trying to smile but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. Ruby had never gotten much response from the man, but now that he was completely checked out, her heart broke for him. But she took him out of his room twice a week and took him to the day room, putting him in front of a window so that he could watch the blue birds building their nest.

            Spring would be coming soon, and then the world outside the window would shrug off its blanket of snow and things would start to grow again. Maybe Sam was like that, maybe he just had a blanket of snow over his mind right now.

            Well, whatever was wrong with him, she fervently hoped he’d beat it.

            Another patient walked over, nervously clasping at his hands as he approached them. “Can… Can I sit with you guys?”

            Ruby smiled slightly and nodded, “Sure thing, Andy, pull up a seat.”

            Andy nodded and sat down, pulling one leg up onto the chair with him and wrapping his arms around it. “He’s… he’s gone, isn’t he?” he asked gently, resting his chin on his knee.

            “Andy,” Ruby replied, a gentle reprimand in her voice, “don’t say that.” But she didn’t deny it, knowing that she didn’t have the answer.

            “Yeah, that’s what I thought… It’s a shame, you know? Because I think I would have liked him.”

            Raising an eyebrow, Ruby turned a little more to look at Andy. Sam had always adamantly refused to leave his room and join everyone in the day room, so he had only been taken there on the rare occasions when the higher ups decided that it was in the benefit of his health to be forced to walk through the compound or sit in a slightly different whitewashed room. So she was surprised by Andy’s reaction. Yes, of course Andy was a friendly patient who got along with everyone, but she hadn’t noticed that he had ever paid any attention to Sam.

            “There’s still a chance that you’ll get to know him.”

            “I don’t think so…” But Andy didn’t explain why.

            “Andy.” She warned again.

            “I know you want to help him, but take my word for it, Ruby, he’s… gone.” Nodding gently, he stood up and smiled sadly. “But maybe he’ll come back?”

            “Yeah…” Ruby hated the haunted look in Andy’s eyes that made him look like he’d lost a friend he’d never had. “I’m sure he will.”

* * *

  Days turned into weeks, which turned into a month.

            Which turned into two.

            And then finally a morning dawned when Sam’s eyes opened and there was a light in them again.

* * *

 

            “It’s time for your appointment with Dr. Woland, Sam. Ready to go?” Ruby asked out of habit, busying herself with checking his room. She almost jumped out of her skin when Sam turned his head and looked at her.

            “Thank you.”

            Two words and she almost flinched, not expecting the silence of his room to be broken. She looked at him with wide eyes, taking in the fact that he was actually looking at her. “Sam? Oh, you’re welcome. But come on.” Knowing better than to make too large a deal of the change in his behavior, she tried to hide her smile as she helped him up and walked him to the office.

            As they walked to the office, she couldn’t quite help herself from stealing glances at Sam, wondering at his sudden change in cognitive state. She had been working with him for almost the entire time he’d been in the asylum, and something about the way he walked, or perhaps how he breathed or looked around them as if seeing everything for the first time, had her worried.

            She was overjoyed that he was no longer completely cut off, but something about how he was acting now just seemed off.

            Then again, he was a patient in an asylum who’d almost died because of medication complications, so maybe she was being overly sensitive.

            When they reached the door for Woland’s office, she knocked gently and pulled it open, peeking inside.

            “Bring him in,” Nick said without looking up, jotting down a few last notes from his patient who had just left.

            “Sir…”

            He looked up and saw Sam’s eyes staring at him, Ruby holding her hands lightly on Sam’s shoulders. “Oh. Are we feeling better today, Sam?”

            “Much better. Not dying any longer, at least.” The words were spoken with an even enough tone, but something about them was barbed and threatening.

Ruby didn’t notice, but Nick did.

“That’s good. We were all very worried about you. Do you remember your heart stopping?”

Sam glanced around the room, eyes lazily moving over each object. “Sam was dying.”

Nick’s eyebrows pulled together, as he parsed through what Sam just said. It was certainly not unusual to have patients refer to themselves in the third person, but he’d never heard Sam do it before. Had the near death experience caused him to have a dissociative episode? “Yes, you were,” he replied, very lightly stressing ‘you’.

A shadow flicked behind Sam’s eyes, but as swiftly as it appeared, it was gone.

Ruby looked between the two men and clapped her hands together, “Ok, well you two look like you have everything in hand. I’m gonna go back to my rounds.” And with that less than subtle transition, she backed out of the room and away from the suddenly stifling atmosphere.

Nick watched her leave, feeling some of the same, strange tension she had, but not wanting to react to it. “Well, would you like to take a seat, Sam?”

Sam didn’t respond, but he did walk over to one of the seat and sit down, arranging himself so one leg was pulled up against him. Something in his stance was looser now, more comfortable in his own skin.

“So…” For some reason, Nick was finding it hard to find his words again, too busy noticing all the strange differences with Sam. Or were they not differences, but simply the man well enough to act like himself again? “Sam—“

“Sam’s not here right now, thanks to all of you, so if you would kindly stop asking for him, I would greatly appreciate it,” Sam said languidly, voice as cold as ice.

Nick’s eyes widened ever so slightly, before he was nodding numbly. Full psychotic break after the fiasco with the panic attack and self-harm? “Well, if Sam isn’t here, may I ask who I’m speaking to?”

Everything about Sam was slower now, more assured, the regal grace of a predator that knows it’s powerful enough to not worry. “No, but I suppose in the interest of not having you continue to call me Sam, I’ll tell you anyways. My name is Lucifer.”

Religious delusions?

“I’m Sam’s oldest friend, so when I saw how terribly you all were treating him, I decided that enough was enough.”

“Does that mean that you took over—“

“Oh, please,” Sam, Lucifer, interrupted Nick again, a slight sneer on his face. “The drugs you gave Sam were killing him, destroying the _very_ delicate chemistry of his brain, and so he regressed further. I am simply holding down the fort until he comes back.”

Generally dissociative personalities weren’t aware of each other. “Does Sam know you exist inside of him?” Now that he was looking for it, he realized that everything about Sam was different, even the voice subtly change in pitch and inflection, cadence and tone. For a moment he imagined that this personality was stressing the sibilants more, but he was certain that was just the influence of hearing the name and the immediate association with serpents.

“Sam knows I exist.” Lucifer replied, words carefully chosen.

Nick picked up on the odd phrasing. “But not inside himself?”

“If he prefers to believe that I am an external entity, who am I to disagree with him. My only concern is his safety.”

Parts of Sam’s file came to mind, and he felt as if a lock had just clicked into place. “Choking his brother,” he said quietly, processing the thought.

“Give the doctor a silver dollar.” Standing up, Lucifer moved around to the back of his chair, hand trailing along it seductively. “There are dangerous people in this world, and it’s my job to keep Sammy boy safe from them.”

“Is Dean one of them?” To Nick, Lucifer sounded like a terribly possessive personality, and his awareness of Sam made him quite dangerous.

“He might be.”

It seemed that Lucifer didn’t want to give him straight answers. Well, that could be worked around, for this was far better than the previous catatonic silences. “Alright, do you consider me a dangerous person?”

Lucifer narrowed his eyes and Nick felt a chill run down his spine, coiling into a frigid weight in the pit of his stomach.

“You brought the maggots along with you, I was ready to think of you as dangerous from just that, but then you drugged Sam.”

“Maggots?” One of Sam’s delusions? Did Lucifer share in the hallucinations and confused reality that Sam had so briefly mentioned?

“Yes, maggots. They ate through his tongue.” Lucifer perched on the chair again, leaving no doubt now that this was in no way Sam. The same frame but such completely different ways of manipulating it.

“Sam bit through his tongue in a seizure-,”

“No,” Lucifer interrupted again, obviously holding no respect for the esteemed doctor. “You don’t understand. Whatever functionally happens in reality doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens in Sam’s mind and how he perceives reality. He felt you brought maggots with you and the infected him. We both understand that he bit through his tongue, but you could show Sam evidence, photos, footage, signed affidavits, and it wouldn’t make any difference.”

“But you understand both sides?” Nick asked carefully, worried by the near omnipotence this personality was displaying. Perhaps again it was the biblical connotation of the name, but this seemed different from any dissassociative or alternate personality he’d ever encountered before. If he was a religious man he’d be looking for signs that it wasn’t possession.

Lucifer crossed Sam’s long legs, posture closing off as he became increasingly defensive, “That’s my job.”

His job? “You consider Sam a job?”

“I have to wonder if you’re actually this obtuse or if you’re just intent on parroting and postulating.” The disgust all too apparent as Lucifer talked, “Yes, I do. My job is to protect him, always has been. Are you married, doc?”

The question took Nick for surprise, and he coughed. “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“So she’s dead.”

He coughed again, uncomfortable with the way Lucifer apparently saw through him. Giving away his personal information had gotten him in far too great a trouble the last time, and he had no intention of making the same mistake. “Why do you ask?”

“Cute, but deflection isn’t your forte. However I’ll humour you. When she was alive, you swore to love her until death do you part, right? It was essentially your job to protect and love her, serve and be served. Just because I think of it as a job, doesn’t mean I’m not doing it willingly.”

The air conditioner clicked to life overhead and filled the heavy silence with its metal hum.

“You make an eloquent point.” Nick forced himself to focus on the enigma in front of him rather than the memories that had been plucked at. “May I ask another question?”

“Why not, I’m just passing the time until Sam’s ready to wake up again, and you pose something of a mystery. You ask one of yours and I’ll ask one of mine. Same deal you gave Sam, seems fair.” Leaning forward, Lucifer rested his forearms on his knees and steepled his hands. “Ask away.”

Having Sam ask questions felt far less threatening than being stared down by this predator wrapped inside the man’s skin and dissected. Nick licked his lips, “That does sound like fair play. So, why Lucifer?”

Lucifer cocked his head to a side and quirked an eyebrow, “Excuse me?”

“Did you name yourself, did Sam name you, were you fully formed from Zeus’ side? I just find it interesting that you introduced yourself as Lucifer, there’s a wealth of associations that come with that name.” Associations that were worrying enough on their own, without the added complications that were beginning to present here.

“Why Lucifer,” Lucifer repeated to himself, “well that’s simple. It’s what Sammy needed.” Standing up and moving to the window, Lucifer breathed against the glass, smirking when it fogged over. He idly traced arcane symbols, “He hates himself, you know. So. Very. Much. My poor little boy blue wants to believe in religion, in something bigger than himself, but he’s jaded by all those unanswered prayers and years spent standing in the doorway to a chapel without a single priest ever asking why he had those bruises, why he as bleeding and broken.”

An intricate pattern was forming over the windowpane, a lattice of curling script and negative space. “So I’m what he needed, a fallen angel who would listen to his prayers and remind him that he has every reason to hate himself.”

“That doesn’t sound like you’re protecting him,” Nick said slowly, carefully, “that sounds like you’re persecuting him.”

The other man turned around and looked at him, “Is that so? Do you know what he went through in his childhood? No, neither does he. I do. It’s my job to remember, endlessly. So I short circuit thoughts in his brain, redirect the emotions that he simply can’t live without. Sam hates himself but doesn’t remember why, so I give him a reason. Sam knows the world is a dangerous place, so I give him a reason not to go outside. Sam knows that he’s never going to get visitors, so I give him companionship and sweet lies that are so much easier than the truth.”

He stood stock still and remote, “Sam isn’t well, doc, and it’s my job to keep him from asking why. There are wounds we don’t pull open again, and that’s all Sam is under the surface, one huge wound.”

Nick tried to follow the twisted logic, finding himself oddly compelled to believe Lucifer, even if he understood that this too was part of Sam’s delusion. If Lucifer was this self-aware and rational then it could be a sign of how the division of the brain was split. Perhaps they shared portions of the brain, while Lucifer controlled others without Sam’s knowledge. This was unprecedented. “I see.”

“You don’t, but you want to.” Lucifer blinked lazily, “Now it’s my turn. Why’d you really leave Petersburg? And don’t think you can pass off a lie to me as truth like you tried with Sam. I have far more experience seeing through things than he does. He’s a little naive that way.” The way that Lucifer smiled it seemed like he found that cute.

“Ah,” he should have expected it would come back around to this. “Well, what I said wasn’t exactly a lie.”

“But you weren’t attacked by a patient.”

“No, my wife and son were.”

The silence stretched out between the two men, both stoically refusing to break it first.

Nick caved, “I had exchanged a few personal bits of information to help grease the wheels with the patient, tried to use my personal experiences to get more interaction. One day he broke free from a lower security section than where he was normally kept and he found my family.”

Lucifer smiled, mirthless and hollow, closer to an animal baring its teeth. “And you’re still parceling out personal information for patient response. One would think you didn’t learn from your lesson.”

The surge of anger was instantaneous and visceral, and Nick had to grip the arms of his chair to keep from rising. With a careful control he forced himself to respond kindly, “Yes, well, whatever helps my patients.”

“Oh see doc, that’s where you’re wrong. I’m not your patient. Sam is. And I’m only talking to figure out why _you’re_ here.”

* * *

 

_Sam is five and the room is stiflingly cramped and contained. He is tired and lonely, but no one is here. Sam has not yet met Lucifer but he has a comforting presence that sits with him some days and waits for Dean and John to get back._

_Sam wonders if the presence is an imaginary friend, because some of the children at the kindergarten talked about how they had those. They said they could see them though, described them in all their childish glee and blind faith. He feels sad that he can’t explain to them about the presence, about how it wraps him up in cool comfort and whispers things he can’t hear but feels in his soul._

_No one would understand unless they felt it, so he doesn’t try._

_But he wants to be able to explain it to them._

_“Um… could you… could you be like them?” he asks the empty room, knowing the presence can hear him, is always there to listen. There’s silence for a long while, a quiet anticipation as his friend thinks. Then there’s a tap at his shoulder and Sam turns around._

_Someone is standing there, all edges and light, eyes blinking in and out of existence over the burning skin. A halo grows from the head, mantid eyes staring with their pinpoint fixation as strange mandibles and tongues move in sinuous motion. Wings rustle somewhere as a young child’s mind is shattered, confronted with the abyss in the depths of that being._

_The presence reaches forward and strokes Sam’s face, healing the wounds its unintentionally caused by its appearance. Madness is catching with humans, and the presence has long since delved into the end of all things. Molten feathers of burning suns drop to the floor and the pitted carpet smells like creation._

_“S…. Sam…” it manages to say, strange mouth parts fighting to form human words._

_Sam’s mind shuts down as he flings himself forward and holds tight to the monster that has come for him. There is no fear in his little body as he clings tight, knowing that at last he isn’t alone any more._

_Horns chime like crystal as the presence folds itself around Sam, holding him protectively. “Sam,” it says again, easier now as it bleeds Other. Shape changes while form and function fit into the right spectrum of things._

_It stands before Sam as a man thing, body ageless and subtly comforting. Ash blond hair and smiling frozen eyes. “Hello Sam.”_

_“Hello Samael,” Sam replies, because he’d know his angel anywhere._


	5. An Empty Nest on a Dead Bough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam's consciousness is still far a field, so Lucifer manages the day to day affairs.

Lucifer stared a long while at his reflection, fingertips dusting over features he knew by heart, forming a kinetic map to navigate by in the dark. “Sam, I’m trying.” In the stagnant air and stale light of the bathroom Sam’s naturally attractive features looked insipid and vaguely repugnant. Pulling lips back, he bared his teeth at the offending reflection, fingers tightening into a fist he dare not let loose. “I can’t get you back if you don’t let me help you.”  


For the briefest of moments the reflection didn’t match Lucifer’s visage, the man inside the mirror was younger and a deep set terror screamed from the depths of his ancient eyes.  


“Sam,” Lucifer’s hand stroked the cheek of that young, lost boy, knowing full well that it was all in their head. Sam was no more in that mirage than Lucifer was. All the mirror could hope to reflect was this body, pale and broken and denied the strength that should have been theirs.  


This was no nightmare and no mirror could show the truth of the mind.  


The quiet sound of the handle turning caught Lucifer’s attention and he opened his eyes, the mirror in his mind slipping away, submerging back to the depths where he kept all memory of Sam. Blinded for eternity, he would still know Sam’s face by heart.  


“Sam,” Ruby appeared, her dark hair bleached blonde for the spring so that she looked like a new person, “it’s time for your appointment.”  


Lucifer idly wondered if it was a requirement to work here to be painfully obtuse, surely Ruby was not naturally so vapid as to miss the fact that Sam was no longer in their presence. Hearing people continually asking for him hurt, each utterance of Sam’s name was a reminder that he had failed Sam. He should have been able to get Sam back by now, drugs or not. “Ah, my dear Ruby, I believe I’ve told you before that I don’t appreciate people mislabeling me.” Far easier to play off his pain as arrogance than to admit to this rabble that he was not all powerful.  


“Or is it policy to not acknowledge any secondary personalities? I mean,” he sat up, sizing up Ruby dangerously, “the name on that chart is Sam Winchester, so obviously he’s the property owner up here.” Lucifer tapped his head and smiled somberly. “Can’t go letting interlopers think they have a chance just because the lot is vacant.” He didn’t miss the shiver that went through Ruby or the way she shifted her clip board from one shaking hand to the other.  


“It’s not… You’re going to come back to yourself one of these days, Sam, and when you do I simply want to be using the right name.” She cleared her throat and stared down Lucifer, knuckles white over the clipboard.  


Raising in indolent grace, Lucifer scoffed. “Yes, and when Sam comes back I will be the happiest of us all. Or do you all think me a villain because of some little play at religious idealism? Hmmm?” He crossed the distance between them, stopping far enough away to keep her from spooking. “Surely you, of all the fanatical staff, understand I’m not a monster.”  


Ruby’s hand went to her necklace, a strange symbol, and she tucked it back inside her shirt. “My faith is more about a philosophy than a belief in a functional lord.”  


“Mmmm, what a pretty way to sum up Satanism.”  


“It’s not all black rites and hanging crosses upside down, if you must know.” However snapping at Lucifer seemed to put steel in her spine again, and she squared her shoulders. “And maybe I just don’t like you as a personality, and it has nothing to do with your name.”  


Lucifer couldn’t quite help his smile, “Ah, a spunky one, aren’t you?”  


“Very.”  


With a half bow, he motioned for her to lead the way, “Ladies first.”  


She waited a half breath, obviously wanting something that she knew wouldn’t come, but with a slight huff of irritation she moved into the hallway and looked back at him over her shoulder. “Well?”  


“You know,” Lucifer began as he fell into step beside her, “it really is a shame that Sam never talked to you. I think you two would have been good for each other. But then, he has unresolved emotional issues from his last girlfriend, so I certainly wasn’t going to push him into any new relationships.”  


Ruby studied Lucifer’s profile, her gaze a tactile crawling over the surface of his skin. “I feel like you’re baiting me.”  


“Of course I am.”  


Their gazes locked and she was the first to look away.  


“Well?” Lucifer asked.  


“Well maybe even if you weren’t in the picture I wouldn’t go looking to my patients for dating material.” There was something free and unbridled in her tone, a humour that danced like firelight. Spring walked next to Winter and the world turned.  


Lucifer’s responding laugh was chilled without malignant intent. “Not quite what I was baiting you with, but I’ll take that into careful consideration the next time I try to hook my little Sammy up with someone.”  


“Would you, really?”  


He quirked an eyebrow at her, pondering her question for a long while. “No,” he finally replied, voice subdued. Ice formed in his lungs as he imagined Sam going through the heart ache of losing someone else, the chill hand of nothingness clawing at his heart beating in Sam’s chest. “No, I wouldn’t entrust him to others.”  


That seemed to catch Ruby off-guard, and a hitch in the rhythmic click-clack of her heels was telling enough. She rounded on him, all passion and suppressed anger. “Entrust him? He’s not yours to--,”  


“Sam has been mine since the day he was born,” Lucifer interrupted.  


Ruby shrank back, terror showing in the whites of her eyes as she stared into madness far more frightening than she’d ever seen inside these halls before.  


“Sam has been mine since the day he whispered into the emptiness that he didn’t want to be alone anymore.” Lucifer stalked forward, crowding Ruby so that she had to keep giving ground. “Sam has been mine since the day he lay dying in the snow and whispered a prayer to his own angel that he might just be not make it this time.” His hand shot out and she flinched from the sound of his palm connecting with the wall next to her, “Sam has been, will always be mine.”  


“Lucifer,” Nicolai’s voice rang out calm and authoritative. “I don’t want to have to sedate you, but if you persist in threatening my orderlies, I won’t hesitate to do so.”  


Lucifer looked from the hypodermic that Dr. Woland was discreetly palming to his own fist, poised and ready to smash into Ruby’s face. Uncurling the fingers slowly, he stepped back and put his hands in his pockets. “And the cavalry arrives.”  


“Apologize.”  


Ruby shook her head and edged away.  


“My deepest and most sincere apologies, Ruby. Punching you really would have been a mistake, but I tend to lose my head over Sam.” He tapped at his head and smiled, once again all charm, “He tends to run hot, and I’m afraid that wears off on me from time to time.“  


Something had closed off in Ruby’s stance, in her eyes; a new sort of skepticism clouding her generally chipper features. She shook her head before turning and walking away, looking far too much like she was retreating.  


“Now, I believe we have an appointment to be starting,” Nick pocketed the hypodermic of sedative now that it no longer looked like Lucifer was about to lose control. “You know if she no longer feels comfortable around you, I’ll either be forced to use restraints or put another orderly onto your rotation.  


Lucifer walked past the doctor, passing into the office, “Do whatever you have to. I don’t really care for demons anyways.” He could feel the restrained curiosity from Dr. Woland at his comment.  


“I can’t tell if you’re grandstanding or if you really feel any conviction in half of what you say,” Nick replied, settling himself behind his desk.  


“I’m always serious, doc, and anything I say that doesn’t fit into your limited understanding is an inside joke with Sam.” He arranged himself on the lounging couch, “You see, Sam has a longstanding belief that if he could look at her in just the right way he’d see a demon beneath her mask of flesh and bone, the twisted darkness of a tormented soul.”  


The clock ticked on the wall as Nick digested the candid response. He scratched at his chin and nodded, “You had mentioned during our last session that you see the aggregate reality of Sam’s delusions and all of this. I suppose it stands to reason that you would slip between them seamlessly.”  


“Have to keep in practice.”  


Nick scribbled something on his pad, pen harsh on the fibers of the paper. “Of course. And according to my notes, you asked the last question of our last session, so I’ll start off this time, shall I?”  


Lucifer waved his hand in an elegant gesture, “Be my guest, doc. You’re saving me from the tedium of waiting.”  


“Right,” scanning a second file folder, Nick pulled out one print-off in particular. “I did a little digging on Sam’s records after last time. I’m sure you weren’t a suddenly formed personality, a singularity in space and time that took Sam by surprise. His medical record points to a childhood history of either an extremely accident prone young man or--,”  


“Abuse,” Lucifer finished for him. “Not bad detective work, although you know what they say about assuming.”  


“It makes an ass of you and me; yes, I know.” Rifling further through the file, he pulled out police reports and a note from CPS. “The official summation was that Sam’s father, a John Winchester, was a slightly distant father, but provided well enough for his boys. They note that he held down a job and was generally held in well regard by his coworkers.”  


“John always was a bigger personality outside the home.”  


Nick looked up at that, “Are you saying they’re wrong?”  


“Is that your question?”  


“No,” he ground his teeth. “But parents aren’t the only ones who can abuse children. Siblings can, or school bullies. And often abusive parents can appear quite loving when company is around.”  


Lucifer held his hand up, a scar like pale ice luminescent against the back of the hand. He remembered when they’d gotten that one, the dull flash of pain as a rock gashed open and gravel bit into his cheek. “Abuse can come in many forms, some more insidious than others.”  


“So we are agreeing Sam was abused?”  


“Tricky, doc, but I’ll give that a pass. Yes, I essentially told you as much last time. Sam was abused and he can’t come to terms with that fact.”  


Nick scribbled more notes, “I felt rather safe in that assumption. The number of his hospital stays, the escalation of his injuries, the rather flimsy reasons provided for each of the trips.” He listed off some of them, “Falling down the stairs, a bike crash, ah and here’s a personal favourite, a hunting accident… at fifteen.”  


Coughing into his hand, Lucifer sat up. “I was there; you don’t need to recount Sam’s highlights for me. I’m assuming you have a question wrapped up in all of this?”  


“Yes, I do. Did you form as a result of the abuse? You seem to consider yourself Sam’s protector, and yet you mentioned that you were also perpetuating Sam’s hatred of himself. That sounds to me like he had internalized the abuse to him as a child, and perhaps you’re just a glorified torturer carrying on the work of suppressed memories.”  


Well if that wasn’t rude, Lucifer really didn’t know what was. He snarled and pushed off from the couch, “Does it? Were you a result of careful planning on the part of your parents or were you a surprise? Do you know beyond what they told you? Someone’s origin isn’t as simple as facts, its interpretation and self-delusion.” Crossing his hands over his chest, he widened his stance. “However to answer your question, no, I was not a result of the abuse. I came along long before that had begun.”  


Closing his eyes, he remembered that small child trembling in his arms, so glad to finally not be alone any more. “Before Sam, I was; I simply waited.”  


“More biblical rhetoric?” Nick asked, not openly sarcastic.  


“Cute, doc. Sorry if you feel I’m channeling I Am, but where there’s a good phrase, a little plagiarism can’t go amiss.” Lucifer could smell disinfectant somewhere outside the office, hear the moans of a patient down the hall, and he remembered that this was the glorious fate to which life had brought Sam Winchester. When he opened his eyes, dull hatred blazed. “As life hurt and twisted Sam, I merely rearranged to suit his growing cognizance of the world around him.”  


The two men stared at each other, a subtle understanding passing between them. Lucifer obviously didn’t see himself as the villain of this story, and Nick quite obviously wondered if Sam shared that opinion.  


________________________________________  


_Sam is twelve and the wind feels like water as he weaves his hand through it. The open window spills sound and smell and sensation at him, a breathtaking cacophony of life. He thinks that he’s never found anything better than an open window on a summer’s evening, driving down Route 66 with no destination in mind.  
_

_He’s still young enough that the plains around him are filled with half-forgotten whoops from Indians and the howls of wolves long gone. The world is full of magic in this moment, and he turns to look at the driver of the car, to see if they share his childish exuberance in the freedom of the open road.  
_

_Dean notices him, smirk forming as he reaches over and ruffles Sam’s hair. “Heh, told you my birthday was going to be a good one.”  
_

_Dean is sixteen and John just gave him the Impala, telling the boys to go get themselves lost for a few days and see the stars at night and feel the wind in their hair. It’s a rite of passage for Dean, a chance to experience freedom and responsibility all at once.  
_

_Sam doesn’t realize this; he merely understands that with this car they could go anywhere they want. Freedom is a set of wheels and two hands planted firmly on a wheel. No one is angry now, no one is hurting him, and the world is warm and welcoming. He nods at Dean and his smile pulls so tight at his face he momentarily worries it might split it in two; which makes him laugh.  
_

_“Glad you’re enjoying yourself, Sammy. Because you know, this… this is how it should be. This is how it should always be, us driving down the road, you in the passenger seat, right where I need ya.”  
_

_The crickets are chirruping loader now, a chorus to herald in the impetus of change.  
_

_“You need me here?” Sam asks, naïve innocence misunderstanding the flash of something dark in Dean’s eyes.  
_

_Dean’s laugh is a bark, too loud and it competes with the crickets. “Of course I need you, bitch.” His smile is warm and the words are soft. “I need you to stay this close,” and he reaches out and squeezes Sam’s shoulder, “because if you get farther away I won’t be able to hold onto you.”  
_

_“Don’t worry, Dean, I won’t go farther away.” Sam’s smile is blinding against the pale illumination of the stars, the milky way a poor excuse for majesty against him.  
_

_Dean’s hand tightens painfully, “Good.” His fingers unclench one by one, and he seemingly misses the pain on his little brother’s face. “Good. Because we lost Mom, Sammy, and all we’ve got is each other.”  
_

_But that’s not right. They have Dad.  
_

_“We have Dad too, Dean.”  
_

_Both of Dean’s hands are back on the steering wheel, clenched about it as if for salvation. “No, we don’t. We lost Dad to his beers and the past. We lost him with Mom. All we really have is each other.”  
_

_Sam is quiet as he thinks this over, mind contemplating the gravity of Dean’s statement. He remembers well the binges their father goes on, the nights spent locked in rooms with sounds of video tapes playing on repeat, the glances at photographs that go on for days. John hadn’t really taught him how to shoot a gun, Luce had done that, and John hadn’t really been the one to teach him how to ride a bike, that was Dean. Each important first day of school, it was Dean holding his hand and telling him this newest school would be fine because he’d be there too. Dean was the one who beat up the bullies and gave him tips on how to talk to girls and cut his hair.  
_

_“Yeah,” there’s no joy as Sam replies, realizing that Dean is right. They are all they have.  
_

_But he has Luce too, so maybe he’s selfish, keeping such a good friend all to himself.  
_

_“Um, Dean…,”  
_

_Dean glances over at him, eyebrows raised in silent query.  
_

_“Never mind.” Maybe it isn’t wrong to keep something for himself, because Luce is there even when Dean isn’t. He isn’t bothered with the fact that there was a point in time when he intrinsically knew that Luce’s name was Samael, for that has gone the way of all things, forgotten in the haze of youth. He isn’t bothered by the fact that Luce has still never interacted with him around others, he’s obviously just shy.  
_

_There are a million things Sam isn’t bothered by right now as he smiles at his brother, the pain from his black eye all but forgotten. “Yeah Dean, we’ll always be there for each other.”  
_

________________________________________  


“Sam’s been gone quite a while now.”  


Lucifer turned his attention from the window, noticing a younger man standing awkwardly a ways away from him. “Excuse me?”  


The man took another step closer, thumb digging nervously into the webbing on his other hand, “I said that Sam’s been gone a while now.”  


“Indeed he has.” Turning, he widened his posture a little to look less closed off, subconsciously playing to ease this curious fellow. “Not many people realize I’m not Sam.”  


“Not many people pay attention. I’m Andy, by the way.” Holding out a hand, he doesn’t seem offended when Lucifer doesn’t shake it. “Right. What do I call you?”  


“Lucifer.”  


Andy nods as if this is a perfectly reasonable name to have and sits across from him. “Do… do you know if Sam is coming back?” He twitches and looks over his shoulder, expression horrified as he loses touch with reality for a long moment.  


“Andy? Andy?” Lucifer reached forward and shakes Andy’s shoulder gently, quietly intrigued even further by this strange individual. The man never approached Sam before, so he can’t imagine why the sudden interest now. Of course people other than Sam have always been confusing to Lucifer, duplicitous or uncaring or entirely useless. “Andy?”  


The last call seems to rouse Andy back from whatever he’d been distracted by and he smiles sheepishly. “Sorry, Ansem gets a little loud sometimes . See,” he goes on before Lucifer can interrupt, growing excited as he notices the spark of interest in the other man, “that’s why I think Sam and I would have been friends. I… I have Ansem, and Sam has you, right? Everyone tells me that I should, should… should admit the reality of my situation and move on. They all think Ansem died in a fire when we were kids, but that’s not what really happened.”  


“Indeed?”  


“Not at all.” Andy leaned forward, resting on the edge of his seat as he tapped at the tabletop, “Ansem always had the ability to influence people. He could just—just say things and people would do it, no questions asked. If he wanted my parents to get him something, bam, he’d have it. If he didn’t want to go to school, tell people he was sick and they believed him.”  


“Ah,” Lucifer nodded, seeing where this was going. “So he simply told people he’d died in a fire when you were children, and they all believed him?”  


Nodding wildly, Andy smiled. “See, you get it. People always look at me like I’m crazy, but they don’t understand how powerful Ansem always was. I mean, I could do it a little bit, but not like him, never like him.”  


What a queer fellow, but he was likely right that he and Sam could have made fast friends. They both shared similar enough delusions that neither would be bothered by the fact that their duo was in fact a quartet.  


“And the reason that no one else seems to notice Ansem--,”  


“Is because he tells people when they first meet him that he isn’t there, doesn’t exist, whatever he needs to say.” Andy was practically thrumming by this point, nervous energy converted to excitement at finding a kindred soul in the patient everyone else scorned like the Devil.  


Lucifer rested his chin in his hand, head tilted to the side as he appraised his new companion. “And why does he do that? Seems a fair amount of work all just to appear dead.”  
“No, see, it’s not about being dead. It’s about protecting me, well, in his own way.” The timid hesitation in his voice made it all too apparent that the brotherly bond wasn’t a necessarily blissful one.  


A protector who didn’t want to share his charge with others, this certainly held a ring of familiarity to it.  


“Andy, has Ansem ever hurt anyone because they got too close to you? Would he mind you and Sam becoming friends?” The last thing he needed was for Andy, or more accurately Ansem, to become violent simply because they were talking to Sam, or Lucifer as the case was currently.  


“Huh? Uh, no. Ansem likes Sam too. He can see that Sam’s special, you know?” Andy leaned in again and cupped a hand to his mouth, lowering his voice so only Lucifer could hear, “Kind of like us.” He moved back and started tracing the wood grains in the table, “Ansem figures that Sam has some sort of powers of his own. We’ve met one or two others like us before, but Ansem didn’t like them. He felt they were threats, but not Sam.”  


“Did Ansem kill the others?”  


The poor man drained of colour at the question. “Not… not exactly.”  


Ah, “Did Ansem tell you to kill them?”  


Andy shook his head. “He can’t use his power on me, but he threatened to make them kill themselves in… in worse ways if I didn’t. I could be kind, kill them quickly.”  


A killer sitting across from him without restraints or special sedatives? Now wasn’t that an incongruity? Lucifer ticked through a list of possibilities: first Andy could have hallucinated killing people just as easily as he hallucinated that his dead brother was still with him, second Andy could have killed people in such a way that he was never linked to the murders although that seemed rather unlikely with how nervous and almost mousy the boy seemed, or third… What? There had to be another tidy explanation for it all, but one wasn’t readily forthcoming.  


“I see. Well then it’s a very good thing Ansem didn’t take an immediate dislike to Sam, isn’t it?”  


The deadly serious warning in Lucifer’s voice had Andy shaking, nodding convulsively.  


This time it was Lucifer’s turn to lean in and whisper, “You see, however dangerous your brother might seem, I am far, far worse. And if either of you should harm a hair on Sam’s head, I will end your miserable excuse for lives in such an agonizing way that you will wish you had never been born. Do I make myself clear?”  


The loud screech of Andy’s chair shooting back across the linoleum silenced the room, all eyes turning to watch as his chair toppled over backwards and he fell in a heap.  


Ruby glared at Lucifer warily as she came over to help Andy.  


“I…. I understand. Don’t worry, we wouldn’t have… never… never hurt Sam. He’s special.” Andy’s weak reassurances were almost lost amidst Ruby’s attempts to calm him.  


“Good, then we’ll all get along just fine.” And before Ruby had a chance to get in his face about what the disturbance had been over, Lucifer was up and walking back to his room, another orderly immediately falling into step beside him once his intentions were clear.  


________________________________________  


In the end, it was the medication.  


Ceasing to take the drugs, working diligently to hide the evidence of his deception, Lucifer felt the first stirrings of change.  


The hallucinations started slowly at first, in lock step with the blooming of the first flowers. As surely as the Groundhog seeing his shadow, they signaled to him that Sam was finally starting to return from the depths of their psyche, bringing his convoluted tangle of lies and self-deceptions to the forefront of their mind.  


Lucifer wouldn’t have it any other way.


	6. Sometimes All of Our Thoughts are Misgiven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam finally wakes up, but there are new storms brewing on the horizon.

“You seem distracted today, Lucifer. You haven’t even made any thinly veiled insults to my intelligence today.” Dr. Woland rubbed at the bridge of his nose, tired after a long day seeing patients. Lucifer’s new quiet was appreciated after the screams and panic attacks of Nick’s earlier patients that day, but it seemed to bode ill. In these past few months he’d felt that they were starting to get somewhere in unraveling the root causes of Sam’s disassociation, and if Lucifer began closing up there was a very real possibility that Sam’s treatment would grind to a standstill.

            “They’re not all so thinly veiled,” Lucifer replied distantly, his eyes fixated on a bare portion of the wall. The silence rushed back in like the tide, eddying around their ankles in cold currents.

“And?”

“I’ve stopped taking the medication and Sam’s finally coming back. Well, his hallucinations are, which means he can’t be too far behind.” Something invisible caught the man’s attention as unfocused eyes tracked right.

            Nick looked over at the wall, curious as to just what Lucifer might be seeing. Of course the first thing to address was the medication. “You’ve stopped taking your medication? Orderlies are supposed to watch you take it while on their rounds.” As soon as he’d said it he felt ridiculous. Inattentive orderlies was not a new problem in the medical field.

            There was a sigh from the leather couch as Lucifer sat up, finally deigning to look at him. “And you’ve never palmed anything in your life? Once I stopped violently resisting, their vigilance dropped off into almost criminal levels of negligence. You should really look into better staff, or maybe better training programs.” He chuckled to himself, “Imagine if I had been a dangerous patient who actually needed those drugs. Why that would have been a scandal.”

            It was almost miraculous how quickly Lucifer could get under his skin, but Nick counted to ten and nodded, knowing well that it was easiest to play along with Lucifer’s capricious mood changes and sardonic responses. “That it would be. Instead we’ll have the pleasure of Sam’s company again?”

            “And what a pleasure it is,” Lucifer muttered, quietly satisfied.

            During their past few months Nick had certainly heard often enough from Lucifer about how he was looking forward to Sam’s return, but there was a niggling worry in the back of his mind. “Is it?”

            “Is what?” Avian inquisitiveness in those familiar hazel eyes somehow had them looking blue, must have been a trick of the light.

            “Is it going to be a pleasure to relinquish control to Sam?” Nick tapped his pen on his notepad, rhythmic thumps as he sorted through the issues he saw arising from this odd situation. “After all, you’ve been the dominant personality for nearly three months now, correct? Surely you’ve developed some taste for freedom, found all the ways you fit under Sam’s skin better than merely being cramped in a corner of his mind.”

            “Jealousy, is that it?” Lucifer sounded unimpressed with the diagnosis as he pulled a leg up under him. “How is it that you still don’t understand me? I honestly feel like I’ve explained my position on this before.”

            It was true. Lucifer had, on multiple occasions, expressed anticipation for Sam’s return; but the specific issue of relinquishing control hadn’t been brought up in so many words. “Experiences can change our perspectives on things. Sometimes we find that our convictions don’t weather all storms.”

            “Oh, of all the…” waving off Nick’s train of thought, Lucifer tapped his fingers on his knee impatiently. “I understand that you’re trying to be a good psychiatrist and plumb the depths of human emotions, but you’re being obtuse again. It doesn’t suit you. I’m not human, not in the same sense you or Sam are. Sam never needed me to be any closer to human than general appearance. My emotional responses to things are naturally going to differ then. Sam’s body is as much mine when I’m in his mind as when I’m swinging his arms and legs around.”

            He rubbed his thumb over the inside of Sam’s knee, small circles, “Are you jealous of your subconscious for the time it spends in the driver’s seat when you’re asleep? I rather doubt it. I have never and will never begrudge Sam control of his body. If the need never arose again for me to take over, I wouldn’t mind at all. Sadly life is cruel and there have been more than a few occasions where I was forced to take over in defense.”

            Nick scoffed lightly, “Such altruism.” None of this tracked; no one was that selfless. Everyone felt some resentment in being replaced. Children held short term grudges against younger siblings being born and stealing the limelight, band members grew to resent the front man, jealous exes found it difficult to move on. “Part of your angelic nature, I’m assuming?”

            “No need to get nasty.”

            Something passed beyond reality and Nick watched as Lucifer suddenly twisted around and stared at the far wall. Muscles stood out in stark definition through the back of the thin patient whites, tension outlining Lucifer in something hungry. Entirely against his will, Nick again felt his eyes being drawn to the same region of wall that Lucifer was staring at. There was nothing there, just the plain cream walls scrubbed rigorously. “What is it?”

            Lucifer didn’t respond, the ticking seconds sounded thunderous in the silence.

            Minutes passed in that fashion, Lucifer’s body held twisted and rigidly at attention, Dr. Woland’s attention wandering as he counted the seconds and debated if he should try to pull Lucifer back from whatever he was seeing. Somehow this felt different than the times when Sam had hallucinated, or even the ways in which Lucifer would follow cerebral images with his eyes while still carrying on a conversation.

            Ceasing to take his anti-psychotics could certainly increase the prevalence of hallucinations, but what was the correlation between the medication and its apparent suppression of Sam’s personality? No see, there he was straying, falling into Lucifer’s rhetoric again. Sam had suffered an adverse reaction to the previous medication and his mind had fractured more visibly while his body healed. Unless Sam’s dominant personality could be influenced by the medication?

            There was still so much about the human mind that simply passed their understanding, which chemical reactions caused what reactions. If Sam Winchester’s case was able to teach him nothing else, at least it was a humbling reminder that the human mind was more complex than his professional mindset allowed him to contemplate. So many cases, so many treatments, so many errant, half-formed diagnoses that he had to lay aside for the most plausible answer.

            He was roused from his thoughts when he felt a hand on his shoulder, cold radiating through his multiple layers.

            Lucifer was leaning over his desk, “Careful doc, stare off like that and they won’t be able to tell you apart from the patients.”

            Shrugging off the touch, Nick straightened his coat for something to occupy his hands with, “Mind telling me what had you so distracted?”

            “I could ask the same thing.”

            Nick sighed and narrowed his eyes, suddenly not in the mood for the endless games.

            “Fine.” Lucifer backed off and walked back to the couch, perching loosely on the armrest rather than sitting properly. “Sam was trying to find me, but he’s still a bit too deep. It would seem that the drugs had a bit more of an effect on him than I was anticipating. He’s floundering in memories right now that he shouldn’t have access to. He’s dangerously close to disrupting the serenity of his ignorance.”

            Interesting.

            “Is that so?” This sounded promising for getting further into the history of Sam’s abuse. “What sort of memories? They would fall under the category of memories you hide from him?”

            “Yes, exactly that sort of memory,” Lucifer snapped, vitriolic and flustered. It was not a good combination and it made him seem more feral than usual. “Have you ever been betrayed, doc?”

            “Everyone has at some point, I’m certain.”

            “No, really betrayed. Purposeful destruction of trust placed in another person?” The apparent temperature in the room dropped as Lucifer rested his face in his hand. “There is a special flavour that betrayal leaves on your tongue, a unique marker that’s emblazoned into your mind. Sam’s trust was systematically ravaged as a child and he’s running through memories like fun house mirrors, everything is distorted and confusing and reflecting a hundred events he doesn’t remember. He’s--,” Lucifer’s voice caught before morphing into a hopeless snarl, “scared, and I can’t help him if he stays in there.” He looked up at Nick through ashen lashes and splayed fingers. “You asked if I was jealous of Sam’s control over his body? That’s such an insignificant matter when I can’t keep him safe inside his mind like I’m supposed to.”

            Nick shifted uncomfortably in his seat, feeling mildly voyeuristic as he watched such a proud man brought to this. “And maintaining control over his body limits what you can do inside his mind?”

            “An astute question for once. Partially, yes. Imagine sitting alone in a dark room at night, eyes affixed on the pages of a book, when suddenly a feeling washes over you that you can’t account for; vast loneliness or crushing despair. Sam’s emotions override all my thoughts, resonate deep within the core of my being, and while I’m out here doing useless things like talking and breathing, I can’t calm him. He’s too distraught to have my words alone do anything.”

            “Then was that – what, you momentarily shedding control of his body to comfort him?”

            Lucifer dragged his hand down his face, grimacing. “No, that was us living through fragments of a memory I had carefully locked down years ago. He’ll have to relive it over and over in his mind until it’s defragmented, each time it slowly grows more overwhelmingly real and immediate. He’ll wake up soon, but this is going to haunt him because he’ll have no context for it, no rational way to explain it away.” His laugh was hollow, “How do you explain to someone that they’re not still at the bottom looking up at that impossible point of hope above?”

            What was Lucifer getting at? This sounded more specific than just Sam’s vague recollections of abuse. Nick made to reply but the clock chimed the hour and an orderly was already opening the door. There would be more time to explore these latest discoveries later. “I don’t know, Lucifer, but perhaps start with assuring them of what is actually the present?”

            _Sam is fifteen and the entire world has shrunken down to a pinpoint of pain, liquid fire racing through his right side that isn’t cooled at all by the puddle of icy water he’s lying in. The pain is a constant companion, weaving through all of his thoughts, dragging him back from the perilous edge of unconsciousness, and fueling his fear. Luce isn’t in the depths here with him; there is only his breathing and droplets falling off the moss to keep him company. Time has long since lost meaning here, stagnant._

_He grunts and shifts to look up the shaft, pale starlight barely showing the distant mouth of the well. Fever chills and suddenly the pain is all he knows again, eyes closing._

_“Luce.” The word is a moaned prayer. Unanswered again._

_If only he could catch his breath, call out to Dean, maybe his brother would rescue him._

_No, Dean wouldn’t do that._

_He wants me to get out of here under my own power. If he helped me, I wouldn’t be strong enough. I’d let him down._

_This isn’t the first trial that Dean has set up for him, but without Luce down here with him he can’t keep the fear from cutting into him. Luce held him in the snow, must have had enough strength left to call out until that hiker had found them. If Luce was here now, then they’d figure out a way to get out in one piece._

_Sam shifts slightly and the motion sends a renewed wave of pain and nausea through him, dry heaves start up again as he’s long since emptied himself._

_Where is Luce? That sole thought resounds throughout his mind, rippling out and touching everything else. Luce is supposed to always be there, always. Luce is the reason he’s not alone anymore, so where is he?_

_Sam is almost certain his right arm is broken, somewhere beneath the livid bruise that covers the length of his forearm._

_Can I climb out with one arm?_

_His fingers won’t flex right and they look swollen from the lack of motion._

_“Sam.”_

_Nothing matters as adrenaline floods Sam’s system and he struggles to his knees, right arm cradled against his chest as he looks up at the mouth of the well. A cloud passes from in front of the moon and there is Luce, limned in the ardent light of the paler celestial mistress. He looks like something holy there as Sam blinks sweat from his eyes. “Luce!” but his voice is still barely more than a rough whisper._

_“It’s alright Sam. It’s going to be alright now.”_

_But this isn’t right. Luce never came. Sam had lain in the well for almost three days before John had returned from his weekend business trip and happened to hear his son’s feeble calls for help. Luce arrived later, at the hospital. A crease forms between his eyebrows as he gazes up at his oldest and best of friends, utterly confused at this shift in events. “But, you never came…”_

_“I’m here now, Sam. Isn’t that what matters?” Luce’s face is a silhouette and his shoulders are too wide. The man at the top of the shaft isn’t Luce._

_“Who are you?” Fear robs Sam of his joy, makes him rude as the pain starts creeping back in._

_The man at the top of the well doesn’t answer, but now Sam knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he isn’t Luce. Luce is younger and yet still timeless. This man, and he is a man, looks almost like Luce, but he most definitely is not his friend._

_“WHO ARE YOU?”_

            “WHO ARE YOU?!” Sam woke himself up with his own screaming, throat raw from the same three words repeated endlessly. A sheen of sweat on his forehead and upper lip cooled his skin unpleasantly, each puff of recycled air robbing him of the warmth he’d found in oblivion. His left hand absently gripped the long healed fracture from the dreamed memory. The lights were too bright, the air too close, everything claustrophobic as he struggled to get his legs untangled from the sheets, heart still beating too fast and breath coming in anaerobic spurts.

            The dream was still there, mixing with earlier scenes of Dean’s face peering down at him, taunting kindly that Sammy could get out of the hole. But Dean would never have done that, never left him down there like that. And who was Luce? That had been Lucifer at the top of the well, the certainty of that fact growing with each passing moment he’s free from the grips of the dream. Lucifer had been trying to comfort him but he’d wanted someone else.

            Sam shoved his legs over the side of his bed and rested his face in his hands, elbows precariously perched on his knees. “Dammit, what was that?” Yes, there were times that Lucifer could be a comfort, but he’d never felt that much… he couldn’t even name the emotion he’d read in Lucifer’s silhouette. If he hadn’t been in so much pain, so worried over this impersonator watching over him, he would have wanted to melt into that emotion, slumber in the protection it promised. Figured that his dreams would find new ways to point out the inadequacies in his life, the utter lack of camaraderie and love. Just what he needed to wake up to.

            Now that his heart was no longer attempting to break the hummingbird beats per minute record, he scrubbed a hand over his face and felt the stiff drag of his stubble. How long had it been since he’d been taken to the in house barber? Well, he’d get around to it. Right now he had more important things to see to. He went through his morning routine on autopilot, bathroom, sink, teeth, brush; his mind occupied with the vague sensation that he was missing something. Patting himself down with one hand he felt everything in its right place, shirt, pants, and he wiggled his toes to assure himself he was wearing he’d actually stepped into his slippers on the way. Yup, nothing missing there.

            His eyes stared back at him lifelessly, reproachful for what he’d forgotten.

            “What?” he asked, bristling defensively.

            The reflection remained silent, a small crack forming at the upper right of the mirror. He reached forward and both of them stroked the crack, plumbing both sides of the oddity. Wasn’t there something about breaking mirrors that brought bad luck? That’d be just what he needed, more bad luck. Leaning in, he breathed on the crack and tried to buff out the crack. It still looked livid after he’d pulled back, but at least it had stopped spreading, spidery filaments waiting at the edges to start up again. “Looks like I’m not the only one who’s cracked up this morning?”

            His reflection didn’t laugh at the joke, he didn’t either. Tasteless joke.

            Just as Sam was starting to turn away, he noticed his doppelgänger move without him. The lips parted as his reflection tried to speak from the other side of the mirror. No sounds came. With an agitated puff at his bangs slipping into his eyes, the other Sam leaned in and breathed fog onto the glass, quickly writing into it before it vanished.

            ؟ **ECUL S’OHW**

            Of course, backwards. Sam mouthed along with the question as he thought it over. “I don’t know who Luce is. I just know that I was expecting him to be there with me in the well and he wasn’t.” His gaze drifted to the crack again and he frowned, not understanding why this was bothering him so much. Luce sounded like it could be a sort of nick name for Lucifer, but he’d never dream of giving Satan endearments. Besides which, Lucifer probably wouldn’t take too kindly to it.

            Speaking of which, where was Lucifer?

            Sam carded a hand through his bangs as he walked back out into his room, worrying at his lower lip as he scanned the empty space. It wasn’t as if Lucifer was always there, but…

            When was the last time he’d seen him?

            His mind suddenly felt like it was moving through molasses as he tried to remember anything before he’d gone to sleep. Patting a staccato beat against the side of his thigh, he sat lightly on the edge of his bed. Why couldn’t he remember anything? Think, Sam, think. He remembered Dr. Woland’s arrival and Lucifer’s hissy fit over that, Lucifer giving him his heart, the maggots. The further along he went, the dimmer and more obscure his recollections became. There had been a complication, then silence. Dreadful silence.

            It came to him with considerable effort and a dizzying swell of vertigo, his hands fisting into his sheets. They’d put him on drugs and Lucifer had vanished. He’d been completely alone, and then there was only darkness.

            What day was it? What was the last day he could remember? His heart sped up again as he realized that he had no notion of time in here, no hallmark’s in his room to let him know if this was tomorrow or a year hence. He looked around the room again, taking in everything. Nothing was new, nothing had changed. Reality was playing nice and had left his room intact, but that did little to comfort him this time.

            “Alright, calm down Sam. Let’s think through this rationally.” He thought he heard a laugh directed at him from the bathroom, and he could just imagine the scathing look of disappointment on his reflection’s face. “What is the last date you remember?” Nothing came to mind, but snow. Okay, he could work with snow. Snow meant that he last remembered winter. The windows near his ceiling were too high to give him a view of anything but a strip of the sky, too frosted to see through clearly. Think, think, think. There had to be some way.

            The door.

            He watched as it swung open on noiseless hinges, the corridor beyond it a gaping chasm of nothingness. There were people out there he could ask. They would know, they were paid to keep track of facts like the current date and president. People considered those bits of knowledge to be signposts. Sam preferred the outback, himself. But right now he needed that little bit of reassurance. Pushing off the bed, he walked to the door in small, measured steps, waiting for gravity to shift or the room to decompress or some force to drag him out into that swirling nether; however when he got to the door he could feel the wood solid under his fingers, the swirling maw juxtaposed over the door he knew must be there. Lucifer was supposed to be here to force reality to make sense, dammit.

            Yes, anger was good. Anger was much better than fear, easier to manage and hold onto.

            Reaching out with blind fingers he traced the seam of the door, wishing that they allowed him a handle on the inside of his door. Instead he closed his eyes and knocked, quiet at first but then gaining in confidence. Someone would come and tell him what season it was. Maybe he hadn’t lost time at all, maybe the dream had just shaken him up and he was worrying over nothing. Except he had lost time before. There was something of a precedent for it in fact.

            And Lucifer wasn’t here. Sam could feel that in his bones, a surety beyond any rational explanation.

            He took a step back from the door vortex when he heard steps approaching, the soft click-clacking of heels. The door never appeared, but instead Ruby materialized from the ether.

            “Your hair’s blonde,” Sam said, mentally comparing it to the deep burgundy he remembered. There was some root growth showing, so it had been a while since she’d dyed it. Damn. That wasn’t a good sign.

            Ruby responded by narrowing her eyes and pursing her lips at him. “Right, I dyed it about a month ago, but you already… know… that,” her words trailed off as she seemed to come to some sort of realization. “Sam?”

            “Yes?” None of this was making sense.

            “Oh, Sam.” Suddenly she was smiling and she reached out and was clapping his shoulder, acting entirely unlike the motivated but somewhat distant Ruby he knew.

            Time had definitely passed then.

            Fighting to maintain his composure, he sidestepped her next pat and coughed. “Would you mind telling me the date?”

            She nodded, easily picking up on his discomfort. “It’s May 24th.”

            “May,” Sam repeated, feeling something cold and dark slither down his spine and pool in his stomach. “I don’t… Last I remember there was still snow out, February maybe?”

            “That doesn’t surprise me, you’ve been,” Ruby stopped and visibly considered how to phrase it, “gone for a while.”

            Sam took a moment to digest that. He’d been gone? That certainly didn’t sound like he’d been in a coma or asleep all that time, and his body didn’t have that lethargic weakness that he’d experienced after a two week medically induced coma. He felt normal, fit. “But you weren’t surprised to see me up and about.”

            The observation hung in the air between them like something rancid and rotting. Ruby’s nose scrunched.

            “So…”

            “So you were gone and a secondary personality surfaced.”

            This time the silence stretched longer, Sam blinking uselessly as he tried to understand that. What, he’d had a dissassociative break? He shifted his weight and opened and closed his mouth a few times. Where did he even start with this?

            “Listen, Sam, maybe we should take you to doctor Woland and he can help you understand what happened a little better.” Ruby looked honestly pained to see his confusion.

            “No, no that’s fine, just--,” he ran a hand through his hair and went back to sit on his bed again. The springs protested weakly and he sympathized with them. “So, what happened? I was someone else?”

            Ruby frowned and shut the door behind her, leaning against the soft padding of the wall. “Basically. He moved differently than you, held himself a little taller. I don’t think I’d ever really realized how tall you were before. You tend to slump.” She sounded a bit flustered, rambling off random details. “He introduced himself as Lucifer--.”

            “Lucifer?” Sam interrupted her, worry flooding ice through his body. “But he’s…” He honestly didn’t know what to say, he’d always been so careful not to tell others about Lucifer. Most people would get worried if he said that he lived with Satan looking over his shoulder.

            She walked over and crouched down in front of him, looking up through her dark lashes. “We all knew you’d come back, and Dr. Woland has been working diligently to understand exactly what caused your dissassociative episode.” Reaching out she tentatively rested a hand on his knee, “So don’t worry, alright Sam? We’ve already blacklisted the medications that caused you to go into cardiac arrest, and your current dosages have been halted by doctor’s orders until we’re certain your system isn’t suffering from any other issues.”

            Lucifer had talked to other people… through him? Sam lost track of what she was saying, staring past her shoulder as he began to realize the implications of that fact. The other blackouts, had Lucifer taken over then as well? Had Lucifer _taken_ over or just stepped in while his own mind was adrift? Lucifer could reorder reality, he could be anyone, do anything. It wasn’t impossible.

            So where was he now?

            “—can you hear me? Sam? Sam?” It was the taint of worry to her voice that drew him back from his thoughts.

            “Yeah, sorry. Just… a lot to digest.” He smiled apologetically and tried to reassure her. Pity he didn’t feel any better. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted that the door had reappeared, so at least reality wasn’t going to come crumbling down around his shoulders on top of everything else.

            “Understandable.” She was up again and bustling around the room, picking up the folded clothes from yesterday. “Well, I’ll drop these off at the laundry and tell Dr. Woland that you’re back. Do you need anything?”

            Sam shook his head, smile still stubbornly in place. He didn’t notice when she left the room, the sound of blood rushing through his ears blocking out everything else.

            Lucifer had been him for months.

            There was a thin comfort in the fact that his comrade and sometimes torturer hadn’t tried to play it off as if he was Sam.

            But Lucifer had…

            Sam slapped his thighs and stood up, suddenly needed to do something, move around before he felt trapped. Pacing came naturally to caged animals, and he fell into step with the path he’d nearly worn into the carpet after years in this room. Twelve paces across the width of the room, seventeen across the breadth, and then twenty one to finish the slightly crooked triangle. Lather, rinse, repeat. His mind began to calm as he moved, muscles wishing for a real run rather than this cramped walking.

            Time passed unnoticed and unannounced, and all the while Sam came to no great resolution. He felt a little better for the exercise, but that was about it. Back to the bathroom, splashing water over his face, he leaned his forehead against the mirror and watched the water spiral down the drain. There was a moist hand print left on the mirror as he pushed himself back, a droplet slipping down the surface of the mirror and resting in the groove of the frame. Sam stared at the hand print and watched as it slowly faded into nothing. “Where’s Lucifer?” he asked the empty room, hands in his pockets as he moved back into his room. The other question from earlier nagged at him as well, who was Luce? If he found Lucifer, he was certain that question would be answered as well.

            He sat at his desk and opened the empty drawers for something to do. Maybe he’d ask Ruby for some paper.

            Dr. Woland looked over the thin sheets of printer paper covered in Sam’s meticulous notes, and Sam wished the man would say something. He’d needed to get it all out while the concept was still fresh, while his memory was still fluctuating between now and then. As terribly anxious as he was not knowing where Lucifer was, Sam felt clearer than he had in years. Reality still bled around the corners, hallucinations marring the benign surroundings, but he felt as if he had a handle on what was and wasn’t really there. Besides, who cared about hallucinations when there was such an important topic to consider? “So? What do you think?”

            “I think that this makes sense after what I’ve gleaned from Lucifer in the past few months.” Nick set the papers down and looked at Sam. He’d called Sam in for a session barely an hour after he awoke, and so far he’d spent the first ten minutes in complete silence as he read over Sam’s musings. “Lucifer portrayed himself as a protector of sorts, although highly twisted and possessive. If you were experiencing blackouts around dangerous situations, it could easily stand to reason that he assumed control to try and protect you.”

            “That’s what I thought too.” Sam crossed his arms over his chest, “I never realized he could do that though. He’s been with me as long as I could remember. I’m sure he told you that I could see him, but this? I had no idea that he could do this.”

            Coughing into his elbow, Nick apologized, “Cold coming on.” He pulled out a petite bottle of hand sanitizer and rubbed his hands together, wafting the smell of antiseptic toward Sam. “But Sam, you do realize that he’s a personality inside your mind, correct? It’s very important that you accept this while you still have this clarity.”

            A personality inside of him? Funny, Lucifer was the only constant in his life, the most real person he’d ever met. “I… I don’t know if I’d go that far. He’s himself, and I’m myself. We’re not,” Sam gestured vaguely without having words to describe how he saw the two of them.

            “No Sam, he is a portion of yourself that changed to defend you.” It was obvious in the way Nick spoke, how he watched Sam, that he didn’t trust Sam to be able to make the right distinctions here.

            “Defend me? Did he tell you how he _defended_ me?” Indignation felt like venom in his veins, thick and viscous. “I’ve suffered more at his hands than from anyone else’s,” the meaning of the words wasn’t carried through in his tone, none of the necessary vitriol to make it sound sincere. There were too many times where Lucifer had been a friend to write him off as an enemy. “It’s… complicated.”

            “I’ve gathered.”

            Sam sighed and debated how much he wanted to go into this. After so many years of keeping this a secret it felt cathartic to have someone, anyone, to talk it over with. So he bit the bullet and started, “I don’t exactly know how to start this, but… Lucifer has always been there. I was kind of an introverted kid, older brother who I idolized and a distant father. I didn’t have Dean’s natural charisma. Dean could just, I don’t know, smile and people melted. I was a little more awkward, plus I was small for a long time. Hit my growth spurt late. Then we moved a lot with John’s work, so I didn’t get to form a lot of lasting friendships.”

            New bus stops on empty curbs, by the time the leaves were falling they’d be another state over.

            “Always the new kid,” old pain laced the words, the child’s hurt over seclusion. “But I had Lucifer. Sure, he’s not someone I’d wish on my worst enemy, but… you get used to having someone there. I never told anyone about him. Not really sure why, but it just seemed like he was a friend I could keep to myself.” There was also the fact that Sam hadn’t realized that there was even the possibility that Lucifer might not be real until he was at college. “He… he was always there to pick up the pieces after I hurt myself.” Muddled memories of hospital visits and always Lucifer was the one sitting at the windowsill, there to greet him when he woke up again. “Dean didn’t always have time, he picked up work pretty early to try and help out. John would go away on business trips and when he was home he drank through a fair chunk of our funds. Dean supplemented with his odd jobs, made sure we always had something in the pantry.”

            “My hallucinations started when I was away at college. I… I thought I saw my girlfriend die. After a while it got too difficult to discern if she was real or if she was dead or, well, you get the idea. I called up my brother, left school, and started going around with him. I couldn’t focus at school and I didn’t want to just waste all that money. Lucifer visited along the way. He never liked Dean, so we’d talk when he was out. And then one night… I blacked out and woke up to find myself choking Dean out.” His hands still burned some nights with the memory of his brother’s fluttering heartbeat, rage and remorse all tangled together. “So I checked myself in here, because I couldn’t trust myself anymore. I mean, my reality was really crumbling, is still too fluid, but Lucifer was never part of the problem.”

            He was defending him, wasn’t he? Sam stopped and thought carefully about it.

            Nick voiced his thoughts for him, “You never imagined a world where he didn’t exist. You want to be ‘cured’, but that doesn’t include Lucifer. Right?”

            Sam nodded slowly, testing out the validity it. It felt right. “No, I just wanted him not to hurt me. Man, I must sound… crazy.”

            “Not more so than most.” The older man seated himself in the chair across from Sam, all at once too close and threatening even with his air of clinical blandness. “What you sound like is someone who’s suffered from a lifetime of abuse and doesn’t know any other way to live. Lucifer is at times your best friend and at times your worst nightmare, so it’s natural to be confused.”

            “I’m confused over a lot of things, Dr. Woland, but this really isn’t one of them.” The time he’d spent without Lucifer, those endless days of calling his name as the drugs dulled his mind into uselessness felt like a morass threatening to drown him. There were far worse fates than seeing the devil, much worse. “In a lot of ways I think that this is the best case scenario, because whether Lucifer is real or not, at least I know where I stand with him.”

            “Even when he’s taking over your body?” Nick replied carefully.

            “It wasn’t like I was around to take care of it.”

            “And if he suppressed you somehow?”

            Sam felt wildly protective of Lucifer, something he’d never experienced before. Listening to Dr. Woland even suggest that Lucifer would do such a thing was atrocious. “He wouldn’t do that. Every time I’ve blacked out before this, even if they were portions of time where Lucifer took control, were never longer than an hour or two at the most. An hour to three months? That doesn’t exactly sound like escalation, it sounds like necessity.”

            His doctor sighed and leaned back into the plush leather, his own chair free of the plastic coating that all other furniture in the hospital had. “You didn’t hear what Lucifer said—.”

            “No,” Sam’s voice was quiet with suppressed rage. Standing up made the room seem smaller, and he fervently wished that Lucifer was here to just solve this already. It wasn’t like him to feel this dependent, this incomplete. He had been through so much shit in his life that he wasn’t going to take shit from anyone new. “Listen to me, Lucifer _isn’t_ the problem here. He warned me when you first came here that you’d be nothing but trouble, and look at what’s happened. You brought the maggots and then you put me on drugs. So answer me this, did he _hurt_ anyone?”

            Nick remained seated, seemingly unruffled by Sam’s intimidating height. “He would have punched Ruby if I hadn’t of intervened, and I was told that he threatened someone in the day room.”

            “But he didn’t hurt anyone.”

            “No,” he begrudgingly conceded.

            “Then he’s not the problem here. He might be a symptom of whatever it is in my head that’s disconnected, but as far as I’m considered, you have no right to try to turn him into the root cause of my insanity.” This was exactly the kind of response that had kept him quiet about Lucifer in the first place. People didn’t understand that it didn’t matter if Lucifer was real or a fucking figment of his imagination, Sam just didn’t want to be alone.

            “Alright, Sam, alright.” Finally rising to match Sam, Nick held up his hands. “I can see that I’ve upset you, and seeing as you’re already dealing with quite a good deal from having finally come back to yourself, how about we call this session done a little early?”

            Sam could see it in his eyes, that pitying look that people always gave him throughout his life, half fearful that he might be the dangerous type of crazy. It hurt as much now as it had when he was young and noticed the wary stares from his classmates. “Yeah, sounds good.” He turned and opened the door, nodding briskly to the faceless orderly who was waiting to take him back to his room. The thin shape of a hypodermic in the man’s breast pocket showed just how little they trusted him. Fine, that was… fine.

            As he turned back to look at Dr. Woland one last time, he flinched as he noticed the shadow behind the man stretch up the wall. Darkness flooded the room, pouring from that shadow in endless torrents. He tore his gaze away just as the tide of death began stripping the skin from Dr. Woland’s bones, exposing those same crimson secrets on bleached bones. “I might be crazy, but you’re the one lying to everyone,” Sam whispered as he followed the faceless orderly back to his room. The short walk to his room felt torturously slow, and he was antsy by the time the orderly had unlocked his room and swung open the door for him.

            “Sam.”

            Lucifer stood just inside the threshold of his room.


	7. All Values Lost, All Virtues None

Sam was about to respond when Lucifer shook his head and nodded toward the orderly still by Sam’s side.

Right.

After the revelation that people now knew about Lucifer, Sam found himself even more determined than before to keep his companion’s presence a secret. Dr. Woland’s reaction had been a perfect example of why it was so vital. So he simply sidled past the faceless orderly and into his room. Without waiting to see if the orderly would say anything, he walked over to his bed and laid face down on the overly starched sheets.

The orderly may have said something but none of it reached Sam, not until he heard the faint click of his door closing.

He didn’t instantly get up and demand answers, only stayed where he was and breathed in the faint autumnal smell of the laundry detergent. It was a good smell, it was grounding. After the morning he’d had, he needed grounding. But then reality rippled and shifted and the sheet smelled of loam and decay.

Taking that as his cue, he sighed and pushed himself up to sit on the edge of his bed.

Lucifer stood immutable and strangely ashen.

Neither of them spoke as they took the other in, eyes almost greedy in their perusal.

Sam spoke first, his unasked questions building up pressure in his throat until he felt he couldn’t breathe. “They tell me you took over my body.” It wasn’t what he’d meant to start with; and it came out in ugly, sullen tones. There were more important things that Sam wanted, needed, to ask, but as soon as the statement had left his lips he found the hidden fears and pains it encapsulated. As fast as he had come to Lucifer’s defense before Dr. Woland, there was still a gnawing fear inside him that so many dissenting voices had to be right. What if Lucifer wasn’t friend, only foe?

But how then could he rectify the fact that the angel had given his very own heart to save Sam? Or how could he explain away the gentle reassurances and the vigilant protection when they were in the world? There were simply too many sides to Lucifer, to this whole situation to just write the angel off as a threat.

For his part, Lucifer seemed to have expected the statement, pregnant as it was.

“They said you almost hurt Ruby, threatened another patient.” Sam hated how very reedy his voice had become in its whisper.

Nodding sadly, Lucifer walked over and crouched before Sam, seeking out the man’s hands instinctively. “You were too far away, Sam. What would you have had me do? I waited.”

Waited. The word was too fragile, too passive an action for Lucifer.

Sam shook his head. “You could have brought me back out?” he hadn’t meant for it to become a question as he pulled his hands from Lucifer’s and fisted them into his pants.

“No, I couldn’t have.” Lucifer looked at Sam’s hands and only closed his eyes, looking too old and tired suddenly. “I very nearly lost you. The medication they had you on,” his voice trailed off. They both already knew what it had done, how serious it had been. “I was forced to wait,” he spat out the last word with rancour. “If I had gone in to find you, your body would have remained in a vegetative state. What if they had decided to let you go? What if while I was inside trying to find you, they euthanized you?”

From Lucifer’s quiet words the threat of that possible reality splashed into living colour for Sam. He could see the doctors shaking their head, the expectant glances toward the clock, the calendar, as days turned into weeks. No one would speak up as advocate and tell the medical staff to wait one more day, just one more. Just another casualty of uncaring fate and unendurable solitude.

“So you’re saying you did it all to protect me?” Sam stood up and looked down into those pale eyes, eyes he wanted to be able to trust; but he couldn’t simply allow himself to buy a party line and be fooled. If Lucifer was being honest, great, but if not, he wasn’t going to get away with lying to cover anything else up.

Quirking an eyebrow as he stood up, Lucifer staunchly maintaining Sam’s gaze. There was no shadow in his eyes, no hesitation. “Yes.”

“And would you take over my body again if you felt there was need for it? Without telling me?” Voice cold as winter, Sam felt surer of himself than he had in years. He was fully aware of the irony that it was because of Lucifer’s heart beating in his chest that he was benefiting from this newfound resolve, that he could stand up to Lucifer if needed.

The question remained if it would come to that or not.

Lucifer took a while to consider the question, each passing second grating on Sam’s nerves.

“Well?” he prompted when Lucifer still hadn’t responded.

“If you were in danger,” the fallen angel stated, “I would do whatever was necessary.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Yes, it does. If it was necessary to take over again to protect your safety, I would do it without hesitation. However,” he held up a hand to silence the interruption Sam was about to make, “it is no longer necessary for you to be kept in the dark about this.”

About this? Sam’s eyes narrowed, “But there are other things I’m in the dark about.” It wasn’t a question, he could see that much from Lucifer’s stance. “Isn’t that right, Luce?”

Lucifer’s breath caught in a shaky start.

Everything inside Sam was white hot rage, demanding he plant his fist in Lucifer’s face and get answers by any means necessary, but he drew a deep breath and held his temper. “I have enough lies to deal with from everyone else; I won’t take them from you too. So is there anything you’d like to tell me? Maybe starting with these memories,” he stumbled slightly over the word, “that surfaced when I came to, and why I was calling for Luce.”

With a nod Lucifer moved to lean against the wall, “I would preface this all with the fact that delving into this could be dangerous for you, that like Pandora’s Box this is not something you can put away again after you understand; but I know that babying you in that manner would only offend you.”

Dean’s voice echoed through Sam’s mind, ‘Damn right it would,’ and he almost smiled at the thought.

“Your memories are an amalgamation of truth and fiction. I could come out and tell you exactly which is which, but--,”

Sam interrupted, a mild headache forming as he came to the realisation, “But I wouldn’t be able to accept it, would I?”

“No, you wouldn’t.” “And being forced to deal with a truth I’d forgotten would be damaging, right?”

Lucifer nodded.

Again Dean’s voice sounded from the depths of his mind, ‘Bullshit.’

Lucifer wouldn’t lie to him though. But if Lucifer hadn’t told him about this before, wasn’t that a lie of omission? “Well, then what can you tell me?”

“I’ll have to be careful, Sam. But if you’re sure…”

Sam nodded.

“Alright.” Lucifer picked at a fingernail, “You mentioned Luce. What do remember of him?”

Should have expected that. Sam sat down on his bed and tried to think back to the memory he’d been wading through before he awoke. “I was in a well, my arm was broken.” He saw Lucifer nodding at him and he bit his lower lip. “I got the feeling that Dean was the reason I was down there. It was a test of some sort, and he expected me to be able to get out on my own. I kept calling out to Luce, I needed him to be there. I saw a silhouette at the top of the well and you spoke, and I didn’t know you. You weren’t Luce, you weren’t supposed to be there at all.” With Lucifer here the crippling fear and pain of the dreamed memory hadn’t returned, but thinking back on it was making his headache worse. “I knew somehow that Luce was supposed to have shown up at the hospital days later, as he silently apologised and held my hand while I recuperated.”

Somewhere down the hall an inmate was singing a lullaby. It felt wrong to hear soothing words crooned in the broken voice of a patient.

“Once upon a time,” Lucifer looked toward the door with a frown, “I was Luce. You needed different things then, and I was different to accommodate that.”

“So,” Sam swallowed against the lump in his throat, “why was I so certain you weren’t Luce?”

“Because what Luce was for you, the role I served for you then, it isn’t who I am now. In all the ways that matter, I am can no longer be Luce.”

These weren’t answers, they were subtle deflections and caged responses, and they pissed him off. “What were you then?”

“I was more innocent,” Lucifer replied in a sharp tone. “You were more innocent. I wasn’t the one who hurt you then. I was the one who licked your wounds and put you back together to face a crueller world.” Turning around he opened a hand and visually traced the heart line through his palm. “You were a boy, and had a boy’s limited understanding of the world.”

“And now?”

“Now you don’t have any understanding of the world at all. Reality is fluid because it stopped making sense to you one day. I was faced with a choice to either let you remember that and perish, or take responsibility for it all. You needed someone to hate, Sam, and I needed you more than I needed your friendship.”

Sam felt water lapping over his hospital slippers but he refused to take his eyes off Lucifer. “So you decided torturing me was the right answer?” The frigid water hurt as it touched him, cold so intense it felt like fire. However it drained something of the inferno growing in his chest and eased the pain that threatened to take away his voice, allowing him to keep his head clear. “And this… this world changing event had to be completely covered up so I wouldn’t, what? Want to die? Want to kill myself? Because I hate to break it to you, Lucifer, but you didn’t do that great a job at playing a villain. Sure, you’ve tortured me, but you’re as much friend as enemy right now. And to top that all off, I just defended you to Dr. Woland. I told him that you weren’t the root cause of all my problems.” Water licked at his heels and numbed his toes, and he remembered the delirious pleasure that came from freezing to death. “I told him that you weren’t the villain of this story. So how about you explain this in concrete terms and leave the excuses out of it?”

Lucifer walked over to him, ice forming in the water as he passed through it, diminutive ice bergs bobbing around them. “Very well, Sam. You nearly died. You were stabbed in the heart. You believed that you deserved to die. You didn’t understand why, but you trusted him so much that you were willing to die if he called for it.” Reaching out, grip bruising on Sam’s arm, Lucifer pulled him up roughly. With their faces only inches apart Lucifer’s breathe fogged the air between them. “And you never deserved that. You had done nothing wrong. You were a young man who wanted love and assurance and support, and you got none. And in that rancid hospital room I tried to hold you as the machines kept you alive but you pushed me away, because you’d believed his words over mine. So yes, I went into your head and I changed your memories. I rewrote whole chapters of your life so that when you awoke it was my fault.”

“But I don’t remember you stabbing me!” Trying to pull away, Sam tensed, readying himself for whatever new torment Lucifer would unleash. “I only remember you cutting me open to give me your heart! I remember trusting Luce so much that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’d show. So you want to explain that? If I needed you to be a villain, why ever act like a friend?” He knew he was screaming by now, could feel his muscles cramping and knotting from the tension, but he couldn’t bring himself to worry about the attention it might draw. All that mattered was the feeling that the deluge was imminent and that Lucifer was both salvation and damnation in one convoluted being. “What does that accomplish?”

Motion and sound and fury and so much cold. Sam blinked when he realised the searing pain in his shoulder was because Lucifer had twisted his arm up behind his back, holding him close, and the undecipherable white noise was Lucifer whispering in his ear as the water continued to flood the room.

“Because I’m your damned angel, and I have to keep betraying you because he betrayed you first.”

There was an old familiar comfort in Lucifer’s frenzied embrace, forests filled with snow and desolation. Some part of Sam realised that he should try to break out of this hold, but his reptile mind screamed to stay perfectly still in the face of a predator.

“And because you can’t truly be hurt by a betrayal from someone you don’t trust, don’t love in some respect.”

Every nerve in Sam’s body was screaming out, klaxon wailing that the next blow was coming, that the other shoe had to drop, but Lucifer only held him like the fading light of the sun and something precious slipping away. What should have been inordinately painful was merely restraining. The water kept rising and it didn’t matter because memories were swimming beneath the surface and Lucifer was keeping him from fleeing right into them. Feeling was fading from his legs now, his core temperature dropping as he let Lucifer hold him in place, and all he could think was that he would die because of this angel and he would die without him. “So you’ll betray me again? Drive a knife in while holding me in place?”

Lucifer was silent.

“Lucifer.”

Nothing.

“Luce.”

The pressure eased slightly and Lucifer pulled back far enough so that he could look Sam in the eyes. “I’m not him anymore, Sam.”

“Answer the question.” Sam was shivering, and he told himself it was because of the water and the way it was crushing his chest.

Lucifer licked his lips, “I can’t.”

Sam hadn’t expected that. “Why?”

“Because I’m not Luce anymore, I’m not Samael anymore either. I’ve made choices that I believed were for the best. I thought I would always make the same choices, but...”

“But what?”

“I continue to change with you, or maybe you continue to change me. Semantics don’t matter in the end.” He dropped his arms to his sides but kept his piercing gaze locked with Sam’s. “I once promised you that I would never lie to you, and then I rearranged your entire mind. I once promised I would never harm you, and then I began to torture you. I believed that the ends would always justify the means so long as it meant you were alive.”

A strange fear was pooling in Sam’s gut as he felt the waters rise above his shoulders. “You’re not going to spew bullshit about how maybe it’d be better if you left so I could remember everything and have the doctors here actually set me straight, are you? Because I’m sorry, but that would be a whole new kind of stupid, especially for you.” Swallowing made his Adam’s apple dip into the water and he fought back another shiver. He was so damn cold. “I told Dr. Woland you weren’t the problem, and I’ll tell you the same thing.”

Lucifer’s smile was brittle, “No Sam, I would never leave you. I can’t. I’m the villain, remember?”

“Right, kind of a subpar villain.”

“At least I haven’t told you that I expect you to die, Mr Bond.”

Sam snorted. “Small consolation, that.” The water tasted salty against his lips, an ocean of angel tears. “So, where does that leave us?” he asked, full of bravado and false calm.

Lucifer’s response was stolen by the water and Sam had to duck his head under the surface to hear it, “You’ll have to break through the memory blocks I set in place and pray you don’t want to die when this is all said and done.” Underwater Lucifer’s entire body was rimmed in a faint glow and the shadow of great, damaged wings stretched out and rippled in the dark water. “It means you’ll have to wake up.”

Wake up?

“Wake up Sam.” Lucifer’s voice was sounding further and further away as Sam’s lungs began burning from the lack of air.

“I’ll be inside, but for right now you need to wake up.”

His lungs were ready to burst as he opened his eyes and gasped for air. He was lying face down on his bed again. Pushing himself up to breathe free of the blanket, he looked around. Lucifer was nowhere to be seen. Rolling over onto his back he stared at the ceiling and blew his bangs out of his face, “But where does this leave us?”

There was no answer.

“Well,” Sam spoke aloud, feeling better if he could at least pretend to himself that Lucifer was there to hear, “you said that you couldn’t go in to get me and control my body at the same time. So… so maybe to undo those memory blocks we’re switching places?” That sounded plausible.

He was alone again, wasn’t he?

Shit.

 

* * *

 

 

“First day of June,” Ruby commented as she sat down across from Sam, following his gaze out the window, “summer’s almost here.”

Sam nodded wordlessly.

“I hate to say it, Sam, but Lucifer was practically a Chatty Cathy doll compared to you. Got something on your mind?” There was real curiosity and care in her tone, as if the answer mattered.

It was strange to hear something approaching honesty from anyone outside of Lucifer.

So he pointed at the pair of sparrows that were flitting about their nest, “I was thinking about being that free. Flight, I mean. They can go anywhere they like, any time.”

“And you feel like you can’t?”

He turned and gave her a look that clearly stated how ridiculous her question was.

“Right,” she coughed to cover her smile. “But they’re not completely free. Yes, they could fly anywhere, but they don’t. Instinct draws them to the same migration every year. Some species of birds return to the exact same nest each year, rebuilding it, enlarging it. For all their freedom, they are still creatures of habit and instinct. Humans might not have the freedom of flight, but we have the freedom of choice. Our pasts don’t have to define us, and our instincts don’t have to blindly guide us.”

Sam thought about that. “But they do. I mean, look around you. This whole place is filled with men and women who are crippled by their pasts.”

Ruby rested her chin in her hand and rolled her eyes, “Come on, Sam. Now you’re being fatalistic. What I see when I look around me are people who have been injured and are recuperating. Just because I can’t see the pain they went through in bleeding wounds or visible scars, doesn’t mean they aren’t fighting to heal all the same. So often we’re told to just get over emotional wounds, to grin and bear it, that we never allow ourselves a chance to grieve.”

“Grieve what?” Sam leaned back in his chair and crossed an ankle over his knee.

“Innocence lost, I guess? We all start out as blank slates and trusting souls, and then life beats us down, shows us that things aren’t how they should be.” Her forefinger tapped against the faux wood grain veneer of the table. “I’m not saying it’s the same for everyone. Some are in here because it’s their own bodies that are fighting against them, but you,” she tapped the table again to emphasise her point, “you always struck me as someone who got one emotional wound too many.”

He felt a smile form on his face without any reason for it, “Oh yeah?”

She nodded. “I didn’t know what to make of you for the longest time, but your whole silence act kind of made that difficult. All too often your silence made people want to ascribe their own issues on to you. You should have seen the range of theories the doctors had on you. But then you started talking, and Lucifer let things drop occasionally, and I kind of got the impression that you were in here because you needed somewhere to go.”

“You make me sound like a runaway.”

“Aren’t we all?” Ruby’s eyes sparkled impishly, and it was clear that she was trying her best not to let this topic get too serious.

Sam chuckled, shaking his head, “Emotional runaways, eh?” His thoughts turned back to what Lucifer had said about his past being too painful to deal with. “Yeah, maybe we are. So what are you running from?”

“Oh, obviously I’m not running from anything, I’m staff. That makes me impervious to the woes of life.” Her crooked smile was too full of verve for the placidity of this place.

“Obviously.”

A scuffle broke out several tables away when Alistair flipped the checker board over. “Ah, duty calls.” Excusing herself, Ruby hurried over to find out what was wrong.

Sam’s gaze slipped back out to the birds outside. Freedom of flight with the burden of instinct, huh? So what did that make him, an angel’s heart meant for flight beating in his chest and memories locked down in his mind? Pushing away from his table he found an orderly to escort him to Dr. Woland’s room. The door swung open when he knocked against it.

“Ah, Sam, hello. You’re a little early for your appointment.”

“I know, I hope you don’t mind,” Sam replied, still hanging in the doorway in case the doctor was busy.

“Not at all, come in.” Dr. Woland waved Sam in. “It’s quite nice to have any of my patients show initiative for their sessions.”

Sam nodded as he closed the door behind him. Part of him wanted to pace, to move for the sake of moving, but instead he sat on the edge of one of the seats and threaded his fingers together. “I think… I think I have repressed memories.”

The doctor tilted his head to the side, fingers playing with the black rimmed reading glasses on his desk.

“I’ve had dreams, memories I think, but they don’t play out quite how I remember they should when I’m awake. There’s this… undercurrent to them. I don’t know quite how to explain it.” Thumb massaging the palm of his other hand, Sam fought to keep his breathing even. How much should he say? He was reticent to explain that Lucifer had admitted to rearranging his memories, as it felt too personal, too damning. “There’s this feeling of dystopia in them, like life is grittier. Compared to the dreamed memories, my normal ones seem almost pastel.” With a frustrated sigh he shook his head, “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to explain this.”

Nick let go of his glassed and picked up his pen, “I think I can understand the phenomenon you’re describing, but how about you walk me through one of these memories and what is different in it when you dream?”

“Okay.”

“One example isn’t all that different between the two versions, so I guess it’s as good as any to start with. It’s my brother’s 16th birthday, and our father had just given him the old Impala and told us to go on a road trip, get ourselves lost for a couple days, see America a little. I think it was sort of a coming of age thing as much as it was a present. My normal memory of that trip is great, endless miles of open rode, eating boxes of powdered donuts in hotel rooms, seeing Carlsbad caverns, regular stuff, but all just kind of rose tinted. I can’t remember a single argument on that whole trip, not even over the music, right?” His knuckles were white from pressing his thumb so hard into his palm, and he forced himself to relax. “But in the dream, I have a black eye and Dean is holding my shoulder too tight. I just get this feeling that I was a little afraid of that trip, but I can’t think of any reason why. Dean is still glad to have me along though, almost…”

“Almost?” Nick asked when Sam fell silent for a minute.

“It’s almost like Dean was trying to be happy. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it just feels like even if he was happy for our trip, it was like he was convincing himself that everything was perfect.” Sam ran a hand through his hair, “I don’t know why I have the black eye in the portion of memory that I dreamed about, and it’s not like Dean hurt me at all, but something just felt wrong, which is strange because all he was talking about was how glad he was to have me along, how he needed me in the passenger seat beside him.”

Making note of something, Nick’s eyebrows pulled together and he shifted in his seat slightly, “He needed you in the passenger seat?”

Sam shrugged, not sure of what to make of it himself. “We were really close growing up. Dean always looked out for me, so I guess he meant having me close enough to protect?”

“Perhaps.”

It wasn’t hard to pick up on the hesitancy in the doctor’s tone. “But that’s not what you think he meant?”

“I wouldn’t presume to know what he meant,” Nick replied, “or what your mind means by it. Having multiple versions of the same memory could signify any number of things, Sam. What other memories has this happened to?”

“Alright. Last night there was a new one. It started out just like what I remember, second year at college and Jessica and I were walking back from a Halloween party. I never was too big a fan of the holiday but Jess, man, she loved it. Wanted to dress up, decorate, go to parties, the whole nine yards. So I’d agreed to go to one of the campus parties with her, on the condition that I didn’t have to dress up too. So there we are, a little drunk as we walked back across town to our apartment. She’s in the prototypical sexy nurse outfit and as we turn down an alley these guys start cat calling.”

It was still so fresh in his mind that he could feel her skin against him, smell the light spice fragrance of her perfume, even taste the cheap alcohol on his tongue. His anger had mounted as the idiots kept on calling after her, assuming she was some skank and asking if they could buy her off him for the night. He’d been so angry with the way they were talking to her, and she’d just tried to tell him that it didn’t matter.

“Real men don’t judge a woman by what she wears, especially on Halloween,” Sam managed to say through clenched teeth to the doctor. “And she kept so calm about it all, didn’t freak out or antagonise them, just kept telling me it wasn’t important enough to ruin our evening. I was in the middle of interviews to get another scholarship, so she knew I couldn’t afford to get into a fight, even off campus. Well one of the guys comes over and asks if she’d like to leave the ‘obviously gay Ken doll’ to have fun with some real men for the night. I took a swing at the guy and lay him flat. Normally in my memory the other guys see the blood on my knuckles from their friend’s broken nose and they high tail it. Jess and I get back without any further problems.”

Nick nodded, “But that’s not what happened this time?”

“No, the guy staggers back but doesn’t go down. Then one of his friends jumps me from behind and gets me in a choke hold. He must have known what he was doing, because he clamped off my blood flow and my vision went black almost instantly. Last thing I heard was Jess screaming, and then I come to a few minutes later, chest heaving and blood on both of my hands. Jess is standing against a wall looking terrified of me, of the four guys who are on the ground around me. They weren’t just down either, most of them looked like I really laid into them; black eyes, missing teeth, bloody gashes. I had a bruise around my throat and blood on my hands, couple of busted knuckles, but other than that I was fine.” There had also been a visceral feel of power flowing through him, the natural high of adrenaline and endorphins and something that tasted indescribable.

“That sounds a bit like Lucifer took over and fought them off for you,” Nick mused.

Sam pushed up from the chair and started pacing. “Exactly, and after these past few months, I have to say that that makes more sense than my regular memory of that night. Don’t you think?”

Hands steepled in front of his mouth, Nick hummed thoughtfully. “It does fit rather well with the protective nature he showed.”

“And that I can understand, my mind is finally ready to deal with the fact that Lucifer had taken over during that instance, but the other doesn’t make sense. Lucifer wasn’t there at all, he wasn’t on that entire trip. I remember.”

“Are there other memories that are different? Maybe there’s more issues here than just Lucifer.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty certain of that.” Lucifer had said he’d been changing in time with him, so the sixty-four thousand dollar question was what exactly had caused him to change.


End file.
